How are you living? How are you thriving?
The exhibition How are you living? How are you thriving?, displayed during the last weekend of September, featured three projects that have been nested together as a commentary on the role of art, art spaces, and culture-based communities in activism, particularly in Poland and Ukraine since the 24th of February 2022. In the space of Stroboskop, Tamara Turliun introduced the traditional Ukrainian craft of vytynanka (ukr.: витинанка) – paper cutouts inspired by vegetables included in a song, referencing the enduring strength of family bonds and kinships and the sustaining, agricultural relationships humans have with the soil. The depicted characters from this song, entitled “The Pumpkin Walks in the Garden”, are adhered to windows which have been collected by the BRDA Foundation for the WINDOW project. Since June 2022, we have been collecting windows from private individuals, developers, and companies to send to Ukrainian partners, including Unity and Strength and Svoi Lydu, for the purpose of rebuilding homes and other structures that have been damaged or destroyed during military actions undertaken by russia.
The third work in this exhibition, located throughout the city of Warsaw, was the open-source project Nearest Bomb Shelter, created by the Bickerstaff agency for the Ukrainian National Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024). The project, somewhat absurd in a city like Venice where there is no threat of material war, takes on a slightly different tone in a city like Warsaw – geopolitically in a very different set of crosshairs. A lot of architectural forms can actually serve for protection – from the more obvious, like underground metro stations, parking lots, or basements of residential buildings, to the less typical but widely available in the city, such as shopping malls, bars, or even an art gallery – if it is located below ground level. You can also find safer spaces in your own apartment behind two walls: you need one to stop the shockwave from the explosion and the other to protect from broken glass and debris.
Upon closing the exhibition at Stroboskop, the bomb shelter posters will remain taped to different walls throughout the city and the windows, along with their paper vegetables, will be distributed throughout Ukraine, donated to families in urgent need of repairing and rebuilding that which has been damaged by war.
(fragments of the curatorial text written by Oleksandra Pogrebnyak (PinchukArtCentre) and Katie Zazenski (Stroboskop))
How are you living? How are you thriving? has been produced for Under the Lying Stone, Water Does Not Flow, a project implemented by Ziemniaki i and Stroboskop Art Space with the support of IZOLYATSIA foundation, Trans Europe Halles, and Malý Berlín, and co-financed by the ZMINA: Rebuilding program, created with the support of the European Union under a dedicated call for proposals to support Ukrainian displaced people and the Ukrainian Cultural and Creative Sectors.
This exhibition ocurred within the framework of FRINGE Warszawa 2024. FRINGE operates in grassroots exhibition and pop-up spaces, and focuses on projects emerging from small artistic communities. This year’s edition of FRINGE Warszawa has been funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage from the Culture Promotion Fund.