The exhibition opened in stages, with the final stage including Polish artists for whom supporting Ukraine felt essential. Oksana Barshynova, the Deputy Director of the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv, came to that final opening. The exhibition made a strong impression on her, and that’s when the idea came about to move it to the museum.
The museum and my gallery had already worked together 10 years earlier in 2015. We had put on a Polish-Ukrainian exhibition about military iconography in art. Back then you could see the different way Polish and Ukrainian artists looked at war and everything connected to it. For the Poles, it was something very abstract, while the Ukrainians had already been at war for a year due to the invasion of Donetsk-Luhansk Oblast and the annexation of Crimea.
That was the beginning of a war which was already a reality for Ukraine. The works of the Ukrainian artists were different, richer in their understanding of war.
JM: The exhibition title was inspired by Steve Reich’s ‘Different Trains’, which has three movements: Before the War, During the War, and After the War. The exhibition ‘Different Places’ just has two parts?
WT: Yes, it’s made up of two parts. The first is ‘Before the War’ and the second is ‘During the War’. We’ve opened the first one in June, the second is opening in November.
Monika Sosnowska, 'Frame for a Bin', steel, photo: promotional materials for the exhibition 'Different Places'
I’ve known that Steve Reich piece for a very long time but I never really delved too deeply into its meanings. And now thinking about this exhibition, I realised something – especially in light of that other exhibition from 10 years ago, which was called Imagination. Reality, meaning imagined war and real war – that we are indeed in different places.
It’s like Steve Reich. His composition was inspired when he realised that if he hadn’t lived as a child in the United States but in Europe, he would’ve travelled on a very different train. He often travelled between Los Angeles and New York because his father lived in one city and his mother in the other, and during World War II he made that train journey many times. As an adult, he later realised that if he had lived in Europe, then he probably would have taken a train just once, on the way to a German concentration camp [due to his Jewish roots]. And it was all about that awareness of these different places. Primarily different places geographically, but also different places in time.
In the first part of the exhibition, we’re showing works by six Polish artists created before 2022, before the full-scale war. On the one hand, I wanted to show what art was like back then, whether we were thinking about the threat or not, whether there was an awareness of the coming war. But not only that. I also want this to be a relatively optimistic exhibition. By showing works from before 2022 in Kyiv, a city that’s been under constant attack lately from Russian drones and missiles, we’re presenting the kind of art that we’d like to see now: art that no longer has to deal with war, with what is. Artists very often respond to the reality surrounding them, so this time we’d prefer they respond to a completely different reality, one where they no longer have to reference the war.
JM: What do you think? Will the people of Kyiv take an interest in the exhibition? Do people under extreme circumstances still think about art? It’s hard to imagine art being of interest to someone unsure they’ll live another night.
