Nobody. Nowhere. Never. God willing!

This exhibition started with an experience. Or an exception? In the winter 2018, artist Nastasiia Leliuk and her mom went home, to Luhansk, to make an exhibition of her friends' works.

At the time, Luhansk had been occupied for 4 years, so “going home” meant getting approved for entrance, passing the block post checks, waiting in long lines, and other pleasant things. After opening, the exhibition has remained in the artist’s apartment, hung in the neverwhere. The story seems absurd, but it carries a profound sense – the desire to be in the place that got stolen from you.

We, the audience, can not witness the gradual transformations happening to the exhibition: the layer of dust growing thicker, spiders weaving their webs between the works, patterns of duct tape on the windows casting their shadows on the pieces. None of that can be seen, but the exhibition and the works keep living. Holding onto this semi-translucent experience, we gently weave it into the mesh of the told and untold stories from the occupied territories, that people who were forced to leave, still hold onto in one way or another.

Nobody. Nowhere. Never. God willing! is a dedication to the lost and, simultaneously, a way to be with our present and future. Through memories and small acts of proximity, we claim the return to the places that are soaked into our bones since the day we were born, the places we can not go now.

Since February 24th, we have been living in a space of shared pain, a pain no longer exceptional. On a certain day between 2014 and now, each of us lost the language for describing our feelings. At that moment, it felt like the right words will never be found. But slowly we seemed to be learning to speak again. We rediscovered the words in the collective – the works of our friends, in the poetry of Ivan Svitlychnyi and Lyubov Yakymchuk, in the texts of Olena Stiazhkina and Stanislav Aseyev, and many others.

Our home was transforming from an abstract place near the front line into an almost corporeal form amid an abysmal void of silence and mutilated landscape. We are conscious of the impossibility of restoring everything “as it used to be”, because it is a dangerous illusion that holds multiple threats. Nothing will ever be as before. The past and the present will be replaced by the future. We all will gather at one big dinner table of the lost, we will talk and share. Everyone will bring a homemade pie with rhubarb, or apricots, and, with the taste of the sweet juice, the pain will slowly fade away.

Artists: Viktoriia Rizentsveih, Yeva Kafidova, Maria Stoianova, Olha Chykalo, Kseniia Buryka, Tamara Turliun, Clemens Poole and Dmytro Chepurnyi.

Curators: Nastasia Leliuk, Natasha Chychasova.

The project lasts till October, 5. 2 floor.