wor(l)ds

installation/performance

Cultural center Giesinger Bahnhof (Munich, 2015)
48 Studenten Neukölln Festival, UP Gallery (Berlin, 2016, festival opening)
GRANICA, Port creative hub (Kyiv, 2017)

Wor(l)ds is an attempt to study the interaction of sounds and letters which have been assigned certain meanings by the human community, to penetrate into the lexical meaning by means of performance. It’s not about the general notion of a subject, phenomenon or feature, but rather about the fact that some words which are essential to our communication are perceived differently by different people, depending on one’s experience and susceptibility.

The first act of this long-term study was an installation that consisted of items purchased at a Christmas sale with widely used words, such as PEACE, LOVE and DREAM, printed on them. The price of a ceramic jar with PEACE printed on it in a Munich souvenir shop fell every week. The situation in the east of Ukraine intensified. Winter 2015.

Later, the items purchased in Germany were supplemented with those from Poland. Items labeled with HOME were the most common.

The subject of 48 Studenten Neukölln Festival was designated as “excess”. The performance exploited excessive use of words. Copied in millions, peace-dream-home lose their sense and are used exclusively as decorations for the consumer world. Spring 2016. The number of internally displaced people in Ukraine reaches hundreds of thousands. By losing your home, you no longer need to decorate it, and thus you lose the connection with household items.

The household items purchased in different countries are mostly unified, simplified and lack unique features. Things that once had some sacred sense often lose it. On the eve of the performance in Kyiv, as part of the GRANICA project, we bought a shopping bag at a discount price from a supermarket that was colored just like the national flag in blue and yellow and a mug with the typical DREAM.