On January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a large-scale exhibition by Ukrainian artist Matviy Vaisberg, “In Search of Lost Meaning,” opened in Kyiv. It is a joint project of the Babyn Yar National Historical and Memorial Reserve and the Ukrainian House, which contemplates the memory of the tragic events of the Holocaust.
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The project invites the viewer to a conversation about the memory of this event through texts by public figures, quotes from people who survived it, archival film footage, the world's first symphony about the Holocaust, written by Dmytro Klebanov, as well as the works of Kyiv artist Matviy Vaisberg.
The exhibition brings together over 200 paintings and graphic works by Matvey Vaisberg, created over the past three decades. These works appear as a concentrated artistic reflection on complex and painful issues of collective memory and trauma, the challenges of modernity and the ontological experience of man. Matvey Vaisberg's central work “Seven Days” becomes a visual metaphor for the search for meaning – a movement from darkness to light, from chaos to structure, from loss to memory.
The idea of the exhibition belongs to Roza Tapanova, the curators of the project are Maria Mizina, Mykhailo Alekseenko, Katya Lisova, Mykhailo Kulivnyk. According to the team, in this exhibition “the Holocaust, the tragedy of Babyn Yar and the modern experience of violence appear not only as historical events, but primarily as a common existential challenge of humanity in a world where life has become fragile.” Through the artist's artistic practice, his reflections on the history of his own family and the meaning of life, the project seeks to answer the question: how does a person find meaning where the world is broken?
The exhibition “In Search of Lost Meaning” will run until February 15.