"MoFu 365/360" creatives:
Olha Kuzyura
Profile
Artist Olha Kuzyura works in the context of visual and conceptual art. She creates scale installations, in particular, graphic, painting canvases, combines easel and experimental graphics in the works. She works with the phenomenon of collective and individual memory by interacting with their material carriers. Most of all, Olha improvises with paper as a document, confirmation of presence. Material objects, which are evidence of the aesthetic and mental sophistication of the era, mean man and reality, which no longer exist. For the author, each paper print is a note that complements the path to actualizing one’s own identity.
Objects being interpreted
House of Gallet family, Lviv
About the project
Lviv is a special phenomenon of different memories where modernism got its unique sound. The multiculturalism of the city at that time contributed to the formation of a special heritage with intertwined religious and ethnic motives. Working with artifacts of material culture makes it possible to understand what objects transformed into historical objects can mean if we consider them as symptoms of the past. Тenement on 16 Kniazha Street has preserved the history of its owners, a Jewish family that tragically ended, as well as the fate of tens of thousands in Lviv. The apartment itself, its material preservation, is present in its absence, it reveals it too much. Here the absence is such a concentrated substance that it occupies its own space.
In the material embodiment of my project, called “Uncreated recollection. Act of Remembrance”, I intend to highlight the dialogue of details. The details dictated by the style of the time, those that were the daily visual routine of the owners. In Jewish culture, for many centuries, aesthetic experience has been an integral part of religious experience. In my work, I intend to turn to the ancient art of reisele. But not in the literal reproduction of the technique of cutting paper, but in the semantic selection of the composition that reveals the most important symbols physically intertwined. Paper installations will be located in the apartment during the residence. “With the help of paper, I intend to take prints, to form posthumous masks of layered energy from material objects. These are interior elements, fragments provided by the people involved. The installation should be an accumulation of different past worlds and their artifacts in the realm of simultaneity. Working with archival materials and residents will allow you to recreate in paper prints lost motifs, details of the apartment, and the rest of the house. It is the associative series formed due to the involvement of others that will reflect the changes over time in the forms of human worldview. The formed material series within the framework of understanding modernism and the interethnic context can be a step towards the transformation of models of historical memory.”
Photos from the author’s personal archive.