We invite you to the opening of the exhibition by young artist Tetiana Pukhnautseva, ‘The Broken Edge,’ which will take place on 7 March at 6:30 p.m. at the Artsvit Gallery. It will run until 15 June 2024.
This project is the result of long reflections on every weak person and how they live with and within their weakness. It is a search for salvation through focusing on weakness, gathering crumbs, and contemplating poor insignificance. Her works tell about people, although there are few images of them — they seem to be dissolved in emptiness, and the artist tries to capture their features, recognise their faces, distinguish them. Through the lens of weakness, poverty and mutilation, Tetiana also examines images of plants, animals and objects.
Reflections on this theme began before 2022, but with the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, they only deepened and gained momentum. The exhibition combines several series, each of which features works created using different graphic techniques: drawing, linocut, embroidery, and relief. The exhibition also features land art objects, such as a ‘patch’ made of wormwood covered with ash and coal.
All of Tetiana's works are quite fragile and delicate, just like the materials she works with. The artist sees new strength and power in weakness — when united, even powerless and frail grass can become a patch and fill the void. This leitmotif, which permeates the entire project, refers to the experience of kintsugi — a Japanese philosophical concept that focuses on imperfection, emphasising lines of rupture instead of hiding cracks and defects. Just as broken dishes, gathered from fragments into a single whole, become a force, so too can people become stronger through trauma. Our borderlands, our reality, are also broken edges, which we, like patches, cover and strengthen by coming together.
"This exhibition is an attempt to see value in fragmentation, to gather scattered grief, to reach out a hand. Where integrity seems to have been irrevocably broken, it will reappear precisely through looking at the line of rupture, uneven and tremulous.
To gather everyone, to leave no one behind. No one will be abandoned," — Tetiana Pukhnautseva
WHEN: 7 March 2024, at 18:30
WHERE: Artsvit Gallery, Dnipro, 21a Krutogirnyy Uzviz. Entrance through the glass doors from the side of Uspenska Square
FREE ENTRY
Design: Tetiana Pukhnautseva, Olena Misyura
Text: Stanislav Pyvonos
Photo: Olya Vasylets
Tetiana Pukhnautseva was born in 1993 in Kharkiv. She works with graphics, art printing, book design, and self-publishing. In her practice, Tetiana combines the principle of free drawing and mechanical printing, characteristic of printmaking techniques such as etching, woodcut, and linocut. The central themes in her work are weakness, fragility, disappearance, and abandonment. The artist conveys these themes through paper and fabric, thereby reflecting on these fragile and vulnerable media, and also incorporates natural materials such as grass, stones, soil, etc. into her work.
She has had solo exhibitions in Kharkiv and participated in group exhibitions and residency programmes in Ukraine, Poland, and Germany.
