Träume einer Menschheitsgeschichte

The dreams of a human history are being put on record. In physical and imaginative form the exhibition documents those longings, fears, and visions, which hitherto have not been registered in an official archive.

The works on display shed light on forms of historiography by centering a single motif: Tetiana Yablonska's «Khlib» [Eng.: 'Bread/Grain']. The work began with a critical analysis of the painting and its history, whose relevance in Ukraine remains undiminished even amid the politics of decommunization. The research included several trips to Ukraine—among them Kyiv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Letava, the village where Yablonska created the painting—from which the works shown emerged.

«Khlib» is omnipresent, caught in a loop of continuous repetitions, revealing the fractured and ambivalent presence of a Soviet past. Registered herein are its countless reproductions and traces as well as its seemingly traceless manifestations: private and collective dreams, textbooks, theatrical re-enactments, forgotten museum collections, and public records. The assembled photographic material has been organized into a new spatial formation and restaged based on a photograph taken in the office in the National Art Museum of Ukraine.