by Polina Kuznetsova
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Our times…
These artworks— they are not depictions of time as a concept, but rather pictographic introspections of the times we live in. These momentous times that are forced upon us by the dreadful present.
But wasn’t the past equally momentous? It had its own crises—financial meltdown, the war, the bloody nineties. And then, on February 24 of 2022, the past—it all but vanished. In the beginning, even the time disappeared, and then the time reemerged, but it was not the time that was before. This new, unknown time—it moved unlike the one we all once knew – a week as if in just a day, a year that would go by, it seems, in barely a month. Nine months have passed as if they never were.
The time dragged on, pulling us in, right into the eye of its perpetual vortex. A myriad of things has happened to us all and not a single one can anyone recall.
The past – it comes to us through time sometimes in dreams—from the subliminal, it slips into the real. Yet it is just a trace, a whisper of small things…
I see myself, I stroll along the streets to my workshop, I see my hometown. Or here is one—I walk where I grew up, this is my neighborhood, my Saltovka, unravaged. These all are simple things, prosaic and mundane—a random doorway of a random Kharkiv house.
It is too early still to draw any conclusions—the war still rages on, the case is not yet closed. And this is why this military series lacks any narrative, they just depict raw feelings. I painted these pieces in a small kitchen in Estonia, glued to my phone – my only connection to the homeland, watching news after news and painting canvas after canvas—all artworks of the war. I felt an unbearable longing to come back home.
And here I am. I am home.
But the distortion of time and space makes it impossible for me to truly return to what was. A sense of home is still out of reach like the paradise lost because home is something familiar, and there is nothing more alien for any of us than the war.
The warmth of a human connection in a store, in a taxi, in a museum, a chance to hear and to be heard, the joy of being understood, the pleasure of helping another human being—these are the only things of value, especially in a time of war.
I am very happy that my scheduled exhibition is actually happening sometime in the fall or in the winter, in Ukraine, in Kyiv, in my country. In times like these I feel as if a helping hand is reaching out from the future to support me from the past, when, back in August of 2022, I was pouring my pain onto the canvases, unable to contain my grief.