GIVEN: 1. YOUR SAFESPACE IS ON FIRE, 2. TRIMESTER, 4. GRANNY

If we think of life as a school maths problem, what then would count as the “given”? It is difficult to answer this question decisively, since it feels like the very terms are constantly shifting. In wartime, these changes are felt more acutely, and you might find yourself unable to keep up with them physically. Yet, if you follow the deadly logic of life’s probabilities in war, it becomes clear that one day everything around you could be reduced to zero.

“At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the past did not exist for me. I wouldn’t let myself look in that direction. But now it has caught up with me,” Katya Buchatska told me in a conversation about this exhibition. Her words point to an important shift in the perception of time, one that has deepened over the last four intense years. It seems possible again to return to what you love and know; to see how much you, and the world around you, have (or haven’t) changed. This comes through in photographs of places now inaccessible for various reasons, in the zine-diary Photographs From the Next Year (2023), in a large painting created back in 2021, and in the voice of the artist’s grandmother, who speaks about everything under the sun.

To a certain extent, the artist’s renewed dialogue with Marcel Duchamp can also be seen as a kind of “return.” Katya’s practice has long shown a consistent reference to his ideas. However, whereas previously these were reflections on the limits of artistic creation through the use of ready-mades, now the artist refers directly to two of Duchamp's works: Given (Étant donnés, 1946–1966) and The Large Glass (La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, 1915–1923). In a non-conventional sense, they are called the artist's “major works.” Katya’s pieces cannot be called “major” in that way; rather, they are a reflection on the difference between contexts and on how these works themselves came into being.

Landscape also holds an important place in the artist’s practice, and through her chosen material — glass — it now takes on a multidimensional quality. No specific location can be identified in it, yet fragments of reality emerge — for instance, a phrase by Donald Trump inscribed across the surface, which reads almost like a piece of everyday wisdom: “We can do it the easy way, or the hard way — and the easy way is always better.”

Katya Buchatska’s exhibition is, in essence, life itself, where so many things coexist at once: a crazy world, war, pregnancy, daily rituals, and artistic practice. It cannot simply be broken down into logical actions or events. Yet there is a desire to hold on to all these states and changes, to keep them in memory, so that one could return to them from the future.

by Natasha Chychasova