Darya Tsymbalyuk
Darya is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of environmental humanities and artistic research. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of St Andrews and has received several awards for her work at the intersection of research and art. Her dissertation focused on stories and memories about people, plants, and geology, as well as displacement and Russian occupation and invasion in the east of Ukraine. Darya was a Max Hayward Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford in 2022-2023 and has an MA from Università degli Studi di Bergamo, the University of St Andrews, and L’Université de Perpignan via Domitia, and a BA from Kenyon College, OH, USA. She also works on the docufiction animation project Displaced Garden and co-founded the participatory art project Donbas Odyssey.
Botanical Documentation of Existence
2023,
Video, 5’32’’
Darya Tsymbalyuk’s video essay Botanical Documentation of Existence, begun shortly before the start of the Russian war, questions the relationship between nature and city, everyday life and war. On the visual level, Tsymbalyuk sketches a plant world untouched by hostilities as a central motif: blue skies above treetops in Kyiv, tracking shots over lush garden plants, superimposed with her mother’s WhatsApp photos of blossoms in full splendor. Against the backdrop of this idyll, the accompanying text forms the strongest possible contrast and, based on conversations with her mother, narrates a fragmentary account of the war’s consequences: fear, exhaustion, a neighbor’s death. The memory of life near two rivers, written before the Kakhovka Dam was blown up by Russian troops on June 6, 2023, forms the conclusion and the most disturbing moment in this quiet work. Despite the hopes of a time after the war conjured up in the text, the reference at the beginning of the video to the devastating attack with massive flooding, fatalities, and destroyed infrastructure remains present and leaves the viewer alone with the contradictions of the situation.
Augarten Contemporary, hoast, IG Architektur, Laurenz, Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Never At Home, Waffen Franz Kapfer, New Jörg, Ve.Sch
October 17–December 17
Main Exhibition
Curators: Serge Klymko, Hedwig Saxenhuber and Georg Schöllhammer