On Witnessing
2023
When Storms Reveal Silence
curated by Oliver Dougherty and Variable Name (Valerie Karpan und Maryna Marinchenko)
Kunstquartier Bethanian, Berlin
site specific, participatory installation of 100 risoprinted postcards
In Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others,” she writes that “it is intolerable to have one’s suffering twinned with anybody else’s”. I have never been in a war, but I wonder: is this true?
Possible definition of solidarity #2 (After Michael Rothberg): Understanding our entangled collective memories and histories as sites of connection, not competition.
The group exhibition When Storms Reveal Silence is the outcome of the several months long online laboratory Her* Gaze, a project inviting feminist artists from Ukraine, Poland and Germany to develop ethical methods for working with the stories of women* affected by war and war-related trauma in the context of Russia's ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine. On Witnessing traces some of the thought processes I went through while engaging with these themes.
Throughout this project, I felt unable to organize my thoughts and the many voices I was trying to listen to. In response, I decided to turn these voices into a series of postcards addressed both to myself and the viewer, who is invited to write back and add their own postcard to the installation. The notes to myself and various potential audiences written on the postcards reflect on the outsider gaze, bearing witness and the possibilities and limits of solidarity across multiple distances. The resulting installation is a physical manifestation of this ongoing conversation, and a space where viewers with vastly different lived experiences of war could listen and respond to one another.