Fragmented Sediments / Polina Davydenko

Polina Davydenko works primarily with photography, video and installation. Her practice explores themes that are personally close to her, whether landscape, home, migration and, in recent years above all, the war in Ukraine. Although she has lived in the Czech Republic since childhood, she regularly returns to her hometown of Dobropilja in the Donetsk region and observes how people, their everyday lives and the places marked by destructive war are changing.

In the exhibition Fragmented Sediments, Davydenko engages with the viewer through a pair of videos and an object installation. The first video was made while Polina was still studying at the FAVU in Brno. Through the voice of extracted coal, it tells of everyday life in Dobropilja, a town defined by black coal mining. It compares the town to the goings-on in a beehive, where the bees, although they produce honey, receive only a sweet substitute in return. Even though coal is everywhere, it is as if no one notices it anymore. It is present like the noise of the mining towers, like the faint whistling in the ears that we hear only when we focus on it, much like the doubts we feel when we think about what we are doing and at what price.

The second video was made during this summer. In it, Davydenko, as an artist and war reporter, returns for the several time to familiar places in the Donetsk region, to document the transformations of the landscape and of its inhabitants, who find themselves at the very center of the war. Although the lives of local people have changed radically since before the war and they are forced to adapt to the current situation, Polina nevertheless observes some parallels in them. Their steps, as before the war, lead beneath the surface of the earth. Not into the mines that the miners had to leave in haste, but into trenches and underground shafts, where they seek shelter from danger, while the front line advances one way or the other and leaves behind irreversible traces on the face of the landscape, empty homes and marked human fates. It sinks deep into the accumulated sediments of soil and memory.

Davydenko is interested in what places to which we have a deep bond can, despite the intervention of destructive external force, preserve within themselves. Her work is sensitive and poetic, yet at the same time it opens disquieting themes and raises fundamental questions that touch each of us. How do we look at images of war? What do they tell us and how do they affect us? Is there a difference between those presented to us by the media and personal testimonies transformed into artistic statements?

Curator: Nina Moravcová Graphic design: Lukáš Matouš The project is realised with financial support from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic (MKČR).