in co-authorship with Anna Ivchenko and Jenya Milyukos
2024 - 2025
Overview: Kurgans, Tombs and Us is a video installation that tells the story of a field trip to the kurgans, ancient burial mounds of the Dnipro region in Ukraine.
The kurgans are both a familiar element of the landscape and an important cultural symbol. Many of these mounds are protected archaeological sites where historians and archaeologists have uncovered crucial artifacts that shed light on ancient burial traditions. Since the russian invasion of Ukraine, some of them have become inaccessible: occupied, heavily shelled, damaged, or repurposed as military positions due to their elevated terrain.
Recognizing the importance of these spaces of memory, places that preserve connections to the land, to ancestors, and to history, we traveled to the hard-to-reach kurgans of the Dnipro region to conduct field research around them. The video essay moves between memory, inherited myths, imagination, and the physical reality of walking through winter fields, where we encountered trenches, flowers, missile fragments, mimicked Scythian rituals, and lay in the crater of a paleovolcano.
Project developed with the support of Scattered Communities - Розсіяне Засіяне Grant Program (Asortymentna Kimnata, Insha Osvita, Robert Bosch Stiftung, Goethe-Institut)
Interview about the project at Artslooker
Detail Images
Site-specific installation at Asortymentna Kimnata, 2025