Polina Davydenko works primarily with photography, video, and installation. In her work, she explores themes that are personally meaningful to her—whether they involve landscape, home, migration, or, in recent years, primarily the war in Ukraine. Although she has lived in the Czech Republic since childhood, she regularly returns to her hometown of Dobropillya in the Donetsk region to observe how people and their daily lives are changing, as well as the places scarred by the destructive war.

In the exhibition Fragmented Sediments, Davydenko engages with the viewer through a pair of videos and an object installation. The first of the videos was created while Polina was still a student at the Faculty of Fine Arts (FaVU) in Brno. Through the voice of mined coal, it tells the story of daily life in Dobropilja, a city defined by black coal mining. She compares it to the goings-on in a beehive, to bees that, although they produce honey, receive only a sweet substitute in return. Even though coal is omnipresent, it is as if no one notices it anymore. It is present as the noise from the mining towers, as a quiet ringing in our ears that we hear only when we focus on it—much like the doubts that arise when we reflect on what we’re doing and at what cost.

The second of the videos was created this summer. In it, Davydenko—as both an artist and a war correspondent—returns for the umpteenth time to familiar places in the Donetsk region to document the transformations of the local landscape and its inhabitants, who find themselves at the very epicenter of the war. Although the lives of the locals have changed radically since before the war and they are forced to adapt to the current situation, Polina nevertheless observes certain parallels. Just as before the war, their steps lead beneath the earth’s surface. Not into the mines that the miners had to abandon in a hurry, but into trenches and underground shafts, where they seek shelter from danger while the front line advances in one direction or another, leaving behind irreversible traces on the face of the landscape, empty homes and scarred human destinies—it cuts deep into the accumulated sediments of soil and memory.

Davydenko is interested in what places with which we have a deep connection can preserve within themselves, despite the intervention of a destructive external force. Her work is sensitive and poetic, yet it also addresses unsettling themes and raises fundamental questions that touch each of us. How do we view images of war? What do they tell us, and how do they affect us? Is there a difference between the images presented to us by the media and personal testimonies transformed into artistic expression?

Curator: Nina Moravcová

Graphic design: Lukáš Matouš