To understand, we understand by studying. To feel the conflict in Ukraine, however, one must enter it, cross the most extreme threshold and leave behind the comfort zone of one’s political, cultural and ideological convictions. This is why the traveling exhibition “The captured house” starts from a door, to be exact the skeleton of a door, the one that the Russian army left standing in an Irpin house and that the curators, including Katya Taylor, they have chosen as an object of art, an “object trouvé” stolen from the oblivion of the rubble and brought to safety beyond the confines of the war to wander in Europe, like millions of refugees, and embody, city after city, the loss of meaning. Irpin’s apocryphal door introduces the 200 real works signed by 50 contemporary Ukrainian artists for this traveling exhibition organized by the PORT agency in Kyiv with the support of the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy, which left Berlin and soon, after Rome (WeGil, largo Ascianghi 5), it will move to Amsterdam (7-15 July) and then to Brussels (from 22 July).
The testimony, testifying to live but also to leave traces of how it all began, of that cold attack suffered by the Ukrainians that European public opinion, pressed by its own troubles, is already beginning to forget.
“I met the war in my house”. They all begin like this, with a dry localization of each artist, the captions that accompany the drawings, photos and installations arranged looking for the logical order that does not exist in life. Someone remained Kyiv, in Kharkiv, in Cherson, in Donetsk, others, like Hanna Hrabarska, fled. There is Zolotar (Oleksiі Zolotariov) who immediately felt the need to talk to art and who for a long time remained silent, speechless, sterile.
Evheniy Maloletka encountered the war in Mariupol and from there, until the end, he photographed the crimes against civilians and the city engulfed by darkness. Alevtina Kakhidze was in the small village of Muzychi, where she drew the bombs, the blood, the endless nights that populate the nightmares of the little ones, the immensity of everything that can be swept away in an instant. Daria Koltsova was awakened in her bed in Odessa, the Queen of the Black Sea, where she continued to work, modeling a small sculpture for each child killed, day after day. Maks Levin was ready, from his native Kyiv he went to meet the attackers with camera in hand to be murdered in Guta-Mezhigirska a couple of weeks after the invasion began, but not before having fixed the images that today make undeniable the role of the victims and that of the executioners. And then there are Hamlet Zinivskyi of Kharkiv, Mikhail Ray, who was in Copenhagen on February 24 and hastily returned to Cherson, where today he lives under an occupation that the portraits of him obliterated by waterproof scars say with the power of a fist. in the stomach.
“The exhibition aims to inform the public but also wants to immerse them in our daily lives: it is the only way to explain what is really happening and to stop this war immediately” explains Katya Taylor.
“The captured house” is theirs, but also ours, a fragile and unsafe common home: whether we like it or not. It is the Casa Tomada from the novel of the same name by Julio Cortázar, which inspired the curators, the four walls from which one suddenly has to escape because a dark, malignant, gigantic force has arrived. And beyond. It is that skeleton of a violated door that today welcomes the Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, the French President Emmanuel Macron and the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Europe in Kyiv with its head bowed. Because evil never knocks on any address: it breaks down the door.