Belonging. Fragments – an interdisciplinary and collaborative project. The concept of the project is based on the work with memories in a family experiencing forced separation due to the war in Ukraine.
2024 UK/Ukraine
In an attempt to piece together the fragments that live in common memory, the artist works with her family members in Britain and Ukraine as an artistic collective to create a film that resembles a delirium mirroring the disorienting and often chaotic experience of forced separation and displacement. Torn pieces are held together, reflecting an almost religious focus on the endless process of collecting and editing these scattered memories. Taken together, they plunge the viewer into a dreamlike, dangerous labyrinth of endless sleep, from which it is difficult to escape. The fragments are assembled into a single story through the sound of ukulele her son plays and air raid alarm in her hometown in Ukraine and remind of a clockwork carousel that could stop at any time, but didn’t yet at this moment.
By working with her family members and picking up the pieces of her life after a severe depression, the artist hopes to make a research about the ethics of being an artist and part of a family at the same time. By exploring issues such as complexity of consent, decision making, care ethics, level of participation she flags and immediately blurs away the boundaries between work and personal life of the artist.
Maria Proshkovska
Illia Lazariev
Oleksii Lazariev
Katya Lazarieva
Olena Lazarieva
Akira
Editing support Anna Sorokolit
Special thanks to Olexander Strizhelchyk, Bryony Graham, Dr. Laurence Daniel Bradley and Dr. Marisa Zanotti
Lucy Nychai, independent curator, co-founder NGO Congress of Cultural Activists (Ukraine) wrote a critical text about this project:
“War… from the political to the intimate. Maria Proshkovska
How does the medium of socially engaged performance become an instrument of care and self-healing from the stigma of being a refugee in times of war?
or
The realm of existence for whales…
The sensitive and tender work of Maria Proshkovska, titled “Belonging.Fragments”, serves as a straightforward explanation of the existential crisis faced by forcibly separated families, who are torn apart in the name of preserving life, making a choice between a traumatic landscape and the deadly danger that constitutes a permanently fatal landscape. In her practice, these two landscapes are not opposed but rather intertwined, becoming a realm of existence, shared experience, and a measure for the forcibly united landscapes and families living within them, who are distanced from one another in the context of war. The realm of existence for whales…
Maria is an artist who has been working for 8 years with her own vulnerability in the physical, gendered, social, and political senses through performative practices and the experience of living out laboratory scenarios. This time, she involves her son, Ilya, in the performance, who represents her most vulnerable spot (both personal and gendered) in the context of war (social and political).
Once again, she accepts the challenge and seeks to speak with the audience about what others tend to conceal.
The process of developing and creating the performance simulates the domestic routine of the artist’s family. Maria examines the impact of her practice on her family, finding a suitable instrument for both realms—care and empathy.
Care is something deeply intimate, socially significant, globally apolitical, and easily comprehensible even without words; it is something as necessary for the individual, the community, and alliances as it is for humanity as a whole—for the preservation of humanity and the environment in which it exists.”
