On June 20 at 7:00 PM, we invite you to listen to artistic practices from artists as part of the group exhibition "The Soil under My Nails Reminds Me of Dried Blood," which is being held at the Kyiv gallery The Naked Room. As part of the event, Secondary Archive participants will talk about the process of writing statements for the platform and read their own statements. We will talk about the meaning of the archive, common lines in practices, and the impact of community and networking.
Participants: Katya Buchatska, Katya Libkind, Karina Sinytsia, Sana Shakhmuradova-Tanska.
Moderator: Alya Segal, curator of the exhibition "The Soil under My Nails Reminds Me of Dried Blood", co-curator of the Ukrainian part of Secondary Archive.
The event will be broadcast live on the YouTube channel of the Artsvit gallery at the link: https://youtube.com/live/BL3bK6R7KDE
“The Soil under My Nails Reminds Me of Dried Blood” is a project about women’s histories, the geography of war, and the shared experiences of six Ukrainian artists, where many stories and testimonies are intertwined. The Secondary Archive project, which includes the artists featured in the exhibition, began as an attempt to record the direct language of women artists when their role in the artistic community was still fragile. When men start wars, women’s voices can become quieter. The Northern Cultural Capital NGO collected testimonies of women who survived the occupation of Chernihiv Oblast.
In dialogue with these stories, the work of Olga Kuzyura, whose family also comes from this region, was created. Kinder Album presented a series of works inspired by obituaries and stories of memory from the deoccupied Kharkiv Oblast, collected by the Memorial project. In her work, Daria Molokoyedova works with the image of her own childhood home, which remains inaccessible in front-line Kramatorsk. Margarita Polovinko, a volunteer paramedic, paints landscapes with her own blood — sometimes abstract, sometimes with recognizable views of her native Kryvyi Rih. Dasha Chechushkova’s panorama of the Black Sea, which the artist captured after the Russians blew up the Kakhovka reservoir dam, rhymes with them. Ultimately, this dialogue goes beyond the current war in Ukraine. Anna Zvyagintseva turns to the advice she heard in childhood to always have sweets with her.
The Secondary Archive project was launched by the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation in 2021, with the Artswit Gallery as its partner in Ukraine; it is funded by the House of Europe program.
The exhibition “The Soil under My Nails Reminds Me of Dried Blood” is supported by the Partnership for a Strong Ukraine Foundation, which is funded by the governments of the United Kingdom, Estonia, Canada, the Netherlands, the United States of America, Finland, Switzerland, and Sweden.
