TREES OF MEMORY:
ROOTS AND RUNNERS
Babyn Yar, 2020, photo by Yevgen Nikiforov for Zaborona.com
The Art & Science exhibition “Trees of Memory: Roots and Runners” and an accompanying public program took place in 2021 in Poland in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute and the Laznia Center for Contemporary Art. The project is dedicated to the Babyn Yar tragedy. It aims at elaborating current artistic practices of working through the traumatic past.
TREES OF MEMORY: ROOTS AND RUNNERS. THE EXHIBITION
13 AUGUST — 30 SEPTEMBER
Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdańsk, Poland
Curators: Oksana Dovgopolova, Kateryna Semenyuk
Artist: Olga Kisseleva
Project manager: Kateryna Kornysyuk
The exhibition is implemented through the Visualise programme of the Ukrainian Institute.
At the end of September 1941, more than 33,000 Kyiv Jews were shot in Babyn Yar. The ravine became the site of a multi-layered tragedy, claiming the lives of Jews, Roma, prisoners of war, the mentally ill, and enemies of the Nazi regime. In the postwar years, Babyn Yar experienced a regime of organised forgetting, confronted with the desperate efforts to preserve the memory of those who respected the dignity of the dead.
After World War II, trees rose silently on the slopes for decades. Covering the tragedy site, they seemed to heal the wounds inflicted on the world by humans. The trees are metaphorical memory capsules that touch yesterday with their roots and tomorrow with their runner. From roots to runners, messages are conveyed from the past to the present. The past is always near, it speaks to us in a language that must be recognised.
People cannot hear the “voices of trees,” but contemporary technologies aid us. The artist Olga Kisseleva, jointly with the engineer Christof Petio from The French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the team of the Sorbonne University, scanned the electromagnetic pulses of the trees in Babyn Yar and created their graphic representation. In the 4-channel video installation, the visitor can see a visualisation of “voices” and the portraits of black poplar and maple.
Photos of the exhibition and project opening
Photo by Bogna Kociumbas
PUBLIC PROGRAM TO THE PROJECT
TREES OF MEMORY: ROOTS AND RUNNERS. CONVERSATION
26 AUGUST
An online talk on Laznia’s Facebook page
Participants: Olga Kisseleva, Ryszard W. Kluszczyński
Language: English
Olga Kisseleva works in science and media art. She is involved in the long-running EDEN project which aims to find methods of communication with plants and between the plants. In the “Trees of Memory: Roots and Runners” project, the artist supplemented her experience of “listening to” the voices of trees with commemorative meanings. The exhibition presents a visualization of the “voices” of trees from Babyn Yar — one of the most known places of the Holocaust by Bullets in Ukraine. The conversation is assembled around the questions of the Art & Science possibilities.
Olga Kisseleva, one of the key figures in the international Art & Science movement and a professor at Sorbonne University. In 1995 she became a member of the High Institute of Visual Arts of Pompidou Center, where she launched the theoretical-artistic research program; Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, media art writer, curator, professor of cultural and media studies at Lodz University, Poland, Chair of School of Media and Audiovisual Culture, Head of the Department of Electronic Media and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz.
TREES OF MEMORY: ROOTS AND RUNNERS. PRESENTATION
An online talk on the Ukrainian Institute and Past / Future / Art Facebook pages
Participants: Tetyana Filevska, Oksana Dovgopolova, Kateryna Semenyuk
Moderator: Anastasiia Yevsieieva
Language: Ukrainian
The presentation was an online guided tour, within which the participants discussed the exhibition concept and illuminated the peculiarities of applying Art & Science tools in commemorative projects. The event included a Q&A session.
Tetyana Filevska, Creative Director of the Ukrainian Institute; Anastasiia Yevsieieva, Head of Visual Art Programme of the Ukrainian Institute; Oksana Dovgopolova and Kateryna Semenyuk, curators of the cultural memory platform Past / Future / Art.
As part of the public program of the project “Trees of Memory: Roots and Runners” the “Past / Future / Art” platform also organised an online discussion on the platform of the Ars Electronica Arts and Technology Festival. For more information please see the event page.
TEXTS
VIDEO
PARTNERS
