Polina Davydenko / Shattered Sediments

Polina Davydenko works primarily with photography, video, and installation. In her work, she addresses topics that are personally close to her – be it landscape, home, migration, and in recent years, primarily the war in Ukraine. Although she has lived in the Czech Republic since childhood, she regularly returns to her hometown of Dobropillia in the Donetsk region and observes how people and their daily lives, as well as places marked by destructive war, are changing.

In the exhibition Shattered Sediments, Davydenko communicates with the viewer through a pair of videos and an object installation. The first video was created during Polina's studies at Brno's FAVU. With the voice of extracted carbon, it tells about the daily life of Dobropillia, a city defined by black coal mining. It compares it to the happenings in a beehive, to bees who, although they produce honey, receive only a sweet substitute for it. Even though coal is omnipresent, it seems no one perceives it anymore. It is present as the noise from mining towers, as a quiet hum in the ears that we hear only when we focus on it, similar to doubts in moments when we think about what we are doing and at what cost.

The second video was created this summer. In it, Davydenko, as an artist and war reporter, returns for the umpteenth time to intimately familiar places in the Donetsk region to document the changes in the local landscape and its inhabitants, who are at the very heart of the war. Although the lives of locals have radically changed since before the war and they are forced to adapt to the current situation, Polina nevertheless observes some parallels. Their steps, like before the war, lead below the earth's surface. Not into mines that miners had to hastily abandon, but into trenches and underground shafts, where they seek refuge from danger, while the front line advances in one direction or another, leaving irreversible traces on the face of the landscape, empty homes, and scarred human destinies – digging deep into the piled up sediments of soil and memory.

Davydenko is interested in what places to which we have a deep relationship can retain within themselves, despite the intervention of a destructive external force. Her work is sensitive and poetic, yet it opens up disturbing topics 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 testimony transformed into an artistic statement?

Curator: Nina Moravcová Graphic design: Lukáš Matouš Project is realized with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.