The program A Millennium Before Them, To Their Spirit offers a vision of the future through the instability of the present: in video works, nature, memory, and the body interact as carriers of archives of change, loss, and hope. Artists capture unfolding catastrophes and create conditions for rethinking our relationship with the environment, history, and our own existence.

The presented works build tension between life and decay, organic growth and mechanical destruction. Video projection becomes a medium of instability: layered frames reveal the spectral materiality of time, where past and future intertwine in an elusive present.

Artists engage with nature as an archive of colonial, technological, and biological interventions. Green is no longer just green, and water is not merely water: they carry layers of toxic history and the pressures of urbanization.

The focus is on catastrophe as a structure—on what happens when development turns into self-destruction.

Can art not only document this crisis but also create conditions for its reimagining?

Anna Potyomkina with Diana Deriy and Chris Voytkiw, One day I had sleeping sickness (2024)

The work intertwines two family stories: a garden in Mykolaiv that continues to bear fruit despite shelling, and memories of cannibalism during the Holodomor. Anna explores how trauma echoes in the body, illness, and sexuality, attempting to shift trauma from a dramatic plane into performative action.

 

Anton Sayenko, Beast (2022)

The human body in wild nature serves as a reminder of primal essence, vulnerability, and the pursuit of purification and freedom. Sayenko presents physical presence as an attempt to return to roots.

 

James Stephen Wright, Untitled (the future is in the archive) (2018)

The work explores the cyclical nature of thoughts and repetition as a mechanism for constructing identity in the modern world. It raises questions about how the invisible effects of progress impact our physical and social existence.

Katia Libkind, Performance Hero (2021)

Reflections on the boundary between performer and hero. Through personal experience, the artist questions when performance becomes genuine experience and what it means to be honest in art.

Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson, Explaining Urbanism to Wild Animals (2002)

Sound becomes a message about the future: the fusion of industrial noise and desolate landscapes transforms into a warning about ecological destruction.

Daria Chechushkova, ghost dancing – within – a sorrow (2023)

A portrait of a person leaving the city and seeking oblivion in the forest. The dance of ghosts becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of returning to past life.

Daria Chechushkova, intermezzo. (2022)

An animated essay about experiencing war remotely. Interweaving personal and political layers, the artist creates a tense space of memory and imagination.

Ker Wallwork, Fungiculture (2021)

The film tells the story of an architect who feels part of the city. Through the transformation of the body into architecture, the artist touches on themes of instability, nature, and the expansion of identity.

Abi Palmer, Slime Mother (2024)

An alternative world where slugs are revered as sacred beings. Through irony and the eroticism of slug corporeality, Palmer proposes rethinking otherness as a manifestation of strength and resilience.

David Sherry, Performance Actions (2021)

Absurd rituals in everyday spaces expose the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, turning the mundane into an extended play of corporeality and absurdity.

The artists address themes of pain, memory, catastrophe, and recovery—not in a straightforward manner but through complex visual narratives that blend the personal and the collective. The video works demonstrate how the boundaries between body and landscape, nature and technology, past and future become increasingly blurred. Artists use the instability of video as a metaphor for time that simultaneously decays and is reborn. Importantly, the program does not dwell on merely documenting catastrophe but seeks new ways of thinking about ecology, memory, and interaction with the environment.

A Millennium Before Them, To Their Spirit is realized with the support of the British Council’s Support for Cultural Activity in Ukraine with UK Involvement program.