2026, Kyiv, Ukraine.
Curator: Anna Tasheva
Photo: Andriy Tsykota
Many of the most important discoveries in the history of paleosciences, such as the Lascaux Cave in France, were made by non-specialists, oftentimes by children. In Karina’s works, the child’s gaze, curious and thirsty for knowledge, turns any place into a space for play, exploration, and discovery. The children’s figures also allude to the story of Mary Anning, an outstanding self-taught paleontologist who began collecting fossils as a child.
In her work, Karina Synytsia often draws on Ukrainian monumental art to highlight its significance. In Discovery!, however, monumental sculptures — in particular Ernest Kotkov’s Vodohrai fountain in Troyeshchyna — serve as a backdrop: to the artist their rounded forms and winding contours resemble landscapes from the distant past, where life teemed among seas and cliffs, long before mass extinctions.
Today, valuable scientific discoveries are often made by Ukrainian soldiers. Military fortification*, a purely wartime undertaking, nonetheless places soldiers on the same level as an archaeological stratum, right alongside objects destined for museum archives: ancient amphorae and Trypillian pottery. There, deep within the layers of soil, they are brought flush against the fragility of someone else's past and their own present.
To be confronted with death, at any age, renders a person defenseless and vulnerable. For children, the first realization of mortality is often a turning point that divides life into “before” and “after.” With time, adults learn to accept it, to put some distance between themselves and it, and to reflect on it in an existential sense: the finiteness of human life and its place in the universe, the natural cycles of death and birth. Despair gives way to acceptance.
What does it mean to find a shell of an ammonite? A creature that lived and thrived long before the emergence of humankind, witnessed the dinosaurs, and then went extinct with them. Its fossilized body bears the traces of past eras, extinctions, and rebirths. To find it is to find death and life at once.
*In this case, the digging of trenches.
Photo: Andriy Tsykota