Nebenan / Close by

2022

Texts, photographs, sound

Site: German Budestag
Date: 19.10.2022-24.02.2023

From 24th of February till 5th of April 2022, Yevgenia published her wartime diary, describing everyday life whose normality was lost overnight in a brutal war of aggression. This material - both in text and in photographs - has formed the basis of the mind map developed for the German Bundestag - a memory map that uses photos and text sequences to reconstruct the "beginning of the war" day by day.

The exhibtion Nebenan / Close by consits of two zones - a white one and a black one. The white one contains the material from the war diary 2022. Unlike earlier diary installations, it is minimazing a direct contact with text, proposing the viewer "only" short quotes handwritten by the author directly on the walls near the photos. The viewer is invited to take a seat at the authors table and to listen to a sound recording in headphones - which is not an instrumental tribute to the audience emergence need, but rather an intimate invitation to "walk in my shoes".

The black zone shows the photographs from the interrupted Christina's day series presenting a portrait of Ukrainian Sinti and Roma communities in the east of Ukraine through the story of the activist Christina Belous. Christina working and living first in Horlivka and then in Toresk - where the war started not in 2022, but in 2014 - is a living symbol of a longer and more complex story of the daily srtuggle with a growing military aggression.

The exhibition is curated by Kristina Volke. Ukrainian artist Ivan Melnychuk has been collaborating on the architecture of the exhibition. Video reportage from the opening can be found under this link.

Below is photo documentation of the opening as well as some selected photographs. 

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Exhibition Nebenan opened in German Bundestag / 19.10.2022