The Sea Doesn’t Forget It’s Free
1 – 28 November 2024
Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to present The Sea Doesn’t Forget It’s Free, a solo show by Kateryna Lysovenko on view at the gallery’s Miami location.
“Who are the mystical creatures – mermaids, centaurs, giant spiders, animated trees, speaking lizards, etc., that so densely inhabit the myths, legends, and tales? They are instrumentalised others, too exotic, distant, unpredictable, bodily, transformed into voiceless, marginalised beings. So, in myths, these dehumanised others are expected to have a logical, tragic, deadly ending. They are breathing in anticipation of a hero – a white, strong man – to be killed or to give their life for them. We see all these countless living, bodily beings only through the eyes of the hero; they remain for us mostly objects, mysteries, backgrounds to which empathy does not apply.
In her practices, Ukrainian artist Kateryna Lysovenko de-centres the Eurocentric anthropocentric myth, finding ways these instrumentalised beasts can manifest their agency. The exhibition The Sea Doesn’t Forget It’s Free opens viewers to possible artistic practices of finding language and freedom for those who are numbed by pain, oppressed, excluded, marginalised.
In her artworks, Kateryna Lysovenko combines two strategies of how the processes of dehumanising the other can be interrupted or disrupted. One is the poetics of the politics of language itself. The creatures in myths have no voice, but in a strange way, they are forever stitched through language into the materiality of everyday life. For instance, Arachne is a sophisticated weaver, deprived of her humanity by Athena – her story is echoed in every spider. The image of a hopelessly beloved girl is echoed in every viburnum. Beasts were killed, but the language remained. In this case, the Ukrainian artist’s search for poetic language fully reflects the approach of the famous American writer Audre Lorde, to whom poetry is not an overabundance, not a decorative element of verbalism, disconnected with daily reality, but ‘it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt.’ Therefore, all these creatures in Kateryna Lysovenko’s pieces are of earthly origin; they are profoundly corporeal and made of flesh and blood – they are alive.
This comprehension of language is associated with the second strategy – to give agency to those who are voiceless is to show them an endless transformation, representing the body’s dynamics. In the artist’s practice, mystical creatures, not necessarily joyful but constantly full of life and action, emerge from a formless mass, frequently in red, pink, and scarlet shades, which refers to blood as a metaphor for the interdependence of life and death.
This pulsating shapeless mass both brings vitality and a sense of insecurity. As an artist from a country where a brutal war has been raging for decade already, Kateryna Lysovenko speaks of her own experience: the sense of unsafety, discomfort, killjoy that she brings with her as a refugee. This performance of redundancy of life and joy, of excessive corporeality and unsafety, is expressed in the fluttering massive and emerging bodies, which do not lose consciousness that they are free even in a situation of ongoing traumatic experiences of violence, dehumanisation, and the impossibility of being heard”, text by Antonina Stebur.
Opening Reception: November 1, 2024, 6-8 PM
Dates: November 1 – November 28, 2024
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 5 pm
Location: 802 NW 22nd St, Miami, FL 33127
