It is difficult to ignore the fact that war reaches into one of the most intimate human experiences: sleep.
What is usually an autonomous and protected space of restoration becomes irreversibly disrupted – anxiety lies nearby. In response, people recall or invent rituals for living with it: repeating familiar gestures, arranging objects, searching for ways to regain an illusion of control where control is no longer possible. Psychotherapy sessions coexist with folk rituals, superstitions, and small acts of chance: loves me–loves me not, it will hit–it will not, me or someone else.
The monotonous repetition that runs through Sofiia Korotkevych’s work is both an artistic method and a material manifestation of her own – and, in many ways, our shared – experience of war as a closed cycle of events that one neither wishes to relive nor has the power to stop. The gestures repeated throughout the making of the works do not dispel the artist’s anxiety. Instead, they give it a form – often beautiful, aesthetic, even comfortable. A form capable of existing within the appearance of normal life.
Anxiety has long ceased to function as a reminder of war’s consequences; it has become the blurred background of an online meeting, another decorative element within an interior – constantly present, rarely noticed. Anxiety becomes a flower folded from a paper tissue, which, as befits an artefact of wartime experience, becomes an object on display. Beneath warped sheets of glass, these flowers sometimes resemble columns of smoke rising from places that have been struck. A glass pillow becomes a souvenir of sleep that no longer comes. Beautiful, yet impractical. Sleep on pins and needles.
Details: lvivart.center
