October 8, 2022

Panel discussion:
"The Labor of Witnessing"

3 pm

The Labor of Witnessing is a conversation between art historian Asia Bazdyrieva, media and information theorist Svitlana Matviyenko, and artist Dariia Kuzmych. The three of them, with different proximity to the Russian attack on Ukraine, have been reflecting, writing, and articulating — through words or images — the convoluted nature of the current war, the place and the role of text, image, and body that produces them. Asia Bazdyrieva's war diaries were focusing on the embodied experience of a person, reduced to the size of the bomb shelter and communication devices, while reflecting on the material implications of this war and Ukraine-as-territory in the transnational nod of energetic speculations and colonial projections. Svitlana Matvienko's war dispatches provided a commentary on the current war as a case of a cyberwar, where it was not the only territory that was under attack but also the epistemological structures and the construction of information. Dariia Kuzmych's practice has been long focused on the embodiment of memory and trauma, and in her recent work, she has been focusing on the current escalation of the war and therefore a new layer of historical events that leave their imprints in bodies and lands.


Photos: Simon Liersam