“Days of full-scale war” is an ongoing series of self-portraits that begun on 24th of February 2022. Each painted with Ukrainian soil, hand-collected from Kyiv Region, Kryvyi Rih and Carpathian Mountains; painted during the full-scale war in Ukraine 2022-ongoing.
The soil is not a metaphor. It is material witness.
The works are titled as units of time, yet what they describe is the erosion of time’s structure. Counting becomes a way to grasp duration, while simultaneously revealing its abstraction.The titles mark specific days: days of blackout, of personal loss, of an identity made gradually unrecognisable by war. As the numbers grow, the person they once documented becomes harder to locate. The self-portrait - traditionally an act of affirmation - becomes here an excavation of what remains. Within this context, the idea of self becomes uncertain. The pre-war identity feels remote, almost inaccessible, as if it belongs to a different temporal reality.
In this ongoing series "Days of Full-Scale War,” an artist documents episodic memory occurred during war, portraits become vessels of war memory, inscribed with the traces of private recollection and collective experience.
