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.
In The Third Reich of Dreams, a collection of nearly three hundred dreams recorded in Germany during the Second World War, journalist Charlotte Beradt recounts the dream of a woman whose apartment walls disappear, leaving the building completely transparent. Beradt interprets this image as evidence of totalitarian power invading the most private sphere of human life. Today, the story acquires another, more literal reading: the enemy erases homes in peaceful cities, often at their most vulnerable moment – at night. Korotkevych develops a personal strategy for living with anxiety by endlessly repeating and documenting its everyday presence. Matchstick houses, sometimes already ruined, are reproduced through blind embossing until only the faintest trace of their imprint remains – or small red dots, reminiscent of a targeting laser. A map of observed destruction. An algorithm of imagined control. Or perhaps permission to accept reality without a visible, desirable future.
Anxiety Lies Nearby is about an experience that continues to repeat itself. It is a document of a culture of survival, kept like a diary with a tiny lock, hidden among pillows and blankets in a bedroom. Open it at night, when you feel anxiety lying down beside you.
Curator – Vita Kotyk
Design — Ihor Tymoshchuk
The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg in partnership with the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation as part of the Scholarship Programme.
The exhibition’s accessibility for blind and partially sighted visitors has been developed in partnership with the charitable organization Foundation 03:00.