„Tears of Things“
The exhibition shows works by Ukrainian artist Anna Perepechai, who has been living and working between Germany and Ukraine since 2014. In her works, the artist deals subjectively and documentarily with colonial and imperial violence on societies, families, bodies, landscapes and everyday objects. Perepechai’s artistic practice combines photography with her own texts, archive materials and installation objects.
In the series of works entitled ‘Tears of Things’ shown in the exhibition, the artist draws on her own family history. She chronicles her family’s life during the war with the help of photographs that trace memories, videos that capture drone flights, and archival materials from the family archive that evoke experiences and people. Portraits of her family members show a transformed life between hope and fear. They address the relationship between the past and the present and how politics and society inscribe themselves into the lives of individuals.
In this complex of works, she deals specifically with questions about life. What matters? What remains? What is forgotten?
Photographs unfold a tapestry of excerpts and moments – observations from the present and the past that intertwine with one another. The associative arrangement of the work “Seems like home” blurs the time levels ‘before the war’ and ‘after the war’. The perception of time as irrational in a state of emergency such as war contrasts with the beauty of everyday life and, through photographs and pieces from the family archive, tells a story of longing for the past and for belonging, of the loss of home, and of the search for memories.
From this very intimate, close view of her roots, the works in the series “Buried” and “Open Fractures” take a step back and process experiences on a more abstract level. In the work “Open Fractures”, UV prints on steel plates show the structures of a destroyed bridge near Anna Perepechai’s hometown of Borzna, which was blown up in 2022 to protect it and it’s citizens. A book on display with black-and-white photographs of the city conveys an observant, analytical view of important buildings, squares or corners where moments important to the artist came to life.
In her work “Buried”, Anna Perepechai addresses the earth, its formations, and the land that is the artist’s home. The shapes of the lines and surfaces in the black-and-white prints hint at the violence inflicted on the country during the Russian war against Ukraine.
Nevertheless, the artist also sees this exhibition as a sign of hope: with her work “If you want to survive, never kneel down,” she uses her documentary photographs to remember the courage, strength, and resistance of Ukrainians on the Maidan in Kyiv during the Revolution of Dignity (2013–2014).
The exhibition by artist Anna Perepechai offers a personal perspective on the Russian war against Ukraine, its eruptions and upheavals in relation to her own family, homeland and home, foreignness and distance, and broadens the view to include the transformations that arise when violence, loss and distance encounter the familiar, the belonging and the intimate.
D21 Kunstraum enters the second round with the f/stop – Month of Photography and dedicated to the “Young Local Photography Scene.” Invited were 2026 graduates of art academies from the Central Germany region to present photographic works created as graduation projects in the context of the current annual theme, “ALIEN.”
© Anna Perepechai – Maidan Protesters at Hrushevskoho Str., Revolution of Dignity, from the book “If You Want to Survive, Never Kneel Down”
2014
