ВИНОГРАД
*
UKRAINIAN
FOR WILD
GRAPEVINE
by Lothringer 13 Halle
in the context of the project “Antifacism: Now.”,
in cooperation
with Goethe-Institut and Artist-in-Residence Munich.
Curated by Kalas Liebfried.
The original vine reimagined in the painting, which climbed through several floors, withered after the 2022 invasion forced Synytsia’s family to flee. Reconstructed here from visual archives of Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, and Kyiv, the grapevine serves as a living metaphor for rootedness and loss.
Metal supports sustaining the vine reflect the fragile conditions in which life persists. As the vine continues to grow in this alternate space and time, so too does the number of victims in Ukraine. “When violence is translated into material terms, recognition often takes the form of compensation. Reparations–which are being addressed here–function as an official gesture of acknowledgment, yet they simultaneously reveal an irresolvable contradiction: loss cannot be fully measured. No calculation can equate to a human life, a destroyed home, or a ruptured future,” asserts the artist. Through this artwork, reparation is articulated as an ongoing process of memory and responsibility in the present, including in the current context of contemporary russian fascism and its violent impact on the whole region.
Wall painting here is reclaimed in opposition to its connotations of Soviet state propaganda, reactivating the medium’s capacity to materialise acts of commemoration within a shared horizon of a future that resists its cancellation.