Asya Marakulina

The installation "Witnesses" was a part of the group exhibition "Leningrad Fireflies". The exhibition was held in the fall of 2021 in the Primorsky Victory Park and was dedicated to the memory of the blockade of Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War. The artists were offered to reflect on how we can talk about those years today. The "Witnesses" were located in 3 places in the park between trees and above the footpaths.

Eyes, as if painted in the sky, silently look at people walking in the park and at the same time invite the viewers to look at the sky through themselves. The sky and trees are silent witnesses of those years. They can't tell us anything. And there are almost nobody of participants who are still alive. Today it is impossible to imagine the experience of the blockade. We can only think about it by reading the diaries and documents of the past. Every experience is unique. It is something that is lived in a specific body, time and place. A blockade is a prolonged experience of hunger, very bodily and deeply traumatic. Thinking about the blockade, we are also faced with a huge time distance. In the same way as we can't imagine someone else's experience, we are not able to know a person completely. When we look into the eyes of another, it is always a meeting with the unknown and incomprehensible. And when we look into the sky, we see, rather, our own reflection. This work is about meeting the unknown in any embodiment. With the unknown hiding in the past, with the unknown within oneself, with the unknown in nature. Even if someone else's experience is incomprehensible, it is important to remember that this other also exists and to look at it.