oksana pohrebennyk
works
about






Barrows, graves and us, 2024 - ongoing

“Кургани, могили та ми”
video essay, sculpture, sound installation, photo and text, in co-authorship with Jenya Milyukova and Anna Ivchenko


video stills
In December 2024, among other two artists, Jenya Milyukova and Anna Ivchenko, we set off on a research expedition to the Dnipropetrovsk region in Ukraine, where we explored ancient burial mounds, also known as kurgans. The project was rooted in personal histories, as each of us have a unique connection to these sites tracing back to our childhoods. Jenya grew up in Crimea, surrounded by the rich Scythian heritage; I lived in a village with a kurgan at its heart; and Anna had recurrent dreams about them. We had planned the trip long in advance. Just days before their arrival in Dnipro, an intercontinental missile struck the city. Though we did not witness its trail, locals described it resembled a falling star. For all people in Ukraine, accustomed to the daily realities of being unsafe, this missile strike was another stark reminder of the ongoing war. The joy of waking up alive sometimes manifests in strange ways, like comparing the light of a missile to the light of a star. Like that, we were determined to continue our explorations. We travelled to the mounds, hoping to find something significant. And indeed, we did. The kurgans or the mounds have been present throughout our lives — as a landscape, as something that takes us back to our childhood, as a presence or absence of roots. Some of them are accessible, while others, under occupation, are only represented by testimonies from open-access cameras or requests from relatives to visit these heights. In recent years, russia has been using these historical structures as a tool for manipulating memory spaces — destroying or using them as strategic heights for attacks and surveillance in the steppes.
It’s striking how different we are with our ease compared to the objects we found there. We arrived with soap bubbles and ribbon bandages, but ended up finding rocket fragments.


Text by Jenya Milyukova





(not fully published)
With the support of Розсіяне Засіяне grant program (Asortymentna Kimnata, Insha Osvita, Robert Bosch Stiftung, Goethe-Institut)

About the project at Artslooker


© 2013-2025 oksana pohrebennyk