The work consists of the artist’s hair and found objects. According to the artist, hair acts as a carrier of experience, part of the body, which will convey the emotions of common person experienced during the war much better than any other medium:
“I spent 11 days under bombs near Kyiv, where there were battles. One day, I had to cut my hair, it was a small thing, but it was my moment of despair. I thought: ‘How many hairs have fallen off our heads?’ As I was leaving, I took the cut-off hair and wrapped it in a piece of paper that I found in my house with the inscription ‘for discarding’. (P.S. it turned out that the address of my university in Milan was written on the other side).
Now the hair is braided (a braid was a subject of pride in ancient Slavic culture) and suspended in the form of the pre-Christian Slavic rune called ‘the world’, which means ‘world’ and ‘peace’. The hair has already been cut, time cannot be turned back, and the dead will not rise. But new hair and new people will grow. The traumatic experience must be processed into dramatic growth. As the air raid siren sounds, on my part, this is the request to stop the violence, an appeal to the world to analyze what is happening and never allow such a thing to happen anywhere, at any time, in the future.
NO to war and pain, NO to tyranny and lies! I hope that this part of my body that came from the war zone carrying bodily experiences and emotional experiences, which you now see on this wall, will clarify that the war is not as far away as you think it is — any war. War is a universal word for Evil, and it is ‘for discarding’.”
Text english translation by artist and curator Maria Myasnikova.