Exhibitons
Echoes of Unity
a traveling exhibition about liminality.
Liminality: being in the process of departure (from a place) and arrival (in a new place),
neither of which stages have been completed yet.
Aren’t all beings liminal by nature? Is certainty, as its suggested opposite, a smokescreen, a make-believe, a fake promise? If everything everywhere is always in flux, isn’t than the stage of liminality – moving through the enigmatic space between two spaces – our only unchanging condition humaine?
(unhome)
While giving a lecture on the subject of independent nomadic curating at the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, that introduced my frequent relocations and countless international journeys, I was asked where home is. “(…) perhaps it is not in this or that city or country (…) maybe it is on the road, when I am traveling. Or it could be that home is when I am absent. I find comfort in unpresence. In hindsight, my 25-year-long vocation is characterized by bidding farewells. The airport terminal is my comfort zone because the only purpose of being there is to leave. In a sense, I experience a self-induced psychological homelessness; a mélange of dislocation, lack of (long-term) belonging and continuous (re)becoming. Independent nomadic curating is a choice; a path of autonomy. I choose not to be rooted. I choose to be in the perpetual process of departures. (…) And I currently find myself once again in a state of liminality – just days before my relocation to Ukraine. It is neither my first nor will it be my last act of international migration, yet it feels like a milestone and a personal renaissance of sorts. I am about to leave.”
(unity)
We first met in the summer of 2025 as an artist collective whose members live dispersed. Our shared space includes Ukraine, migration and art. Through Echoes of Unity, we have become fellow travelers en route to three destinations. And through our journey sounds an echo of unity. Because, individuals who migrate share an unspoken bond; an intuitive connection based on similar experiences. The artists ought to be credited for placing the subject of liminality central to the project. Unknown to them, I had researched the theme for a 2024 essay assignment, titled: “On nomadism, existential migration and displacement”, and I continued to be invested in the subject for personal reasons. The text features interviews with emerging artists from Ukraine who were forced to relocate in 2022, and presents different reasons for migration, e.g.: voluntary or involuntary; fueled by a refusal to stay in one place for too long; or caused by an innate restlessness that cannot be soothed in the home environment. A valuable resource on this topic can be found in Greg Madison’s 2009 “The End of Belonging, Untold Stories of Leaving Home and the Psychology of Global Relocation.” The author introduces a specific type of an expatriate; one that has existential motivations to travel, to express something fundamental about existence; by becoming a foreigner. The so-called existential migrant questions elementary beliefs, values and the meaning of existence, and his journeys are as much personal as philosophical explorations. He is motivated by a need to be unencumbered, independent, on a journey to realize one’s self-potential. Of course, the profile of the existential migrant as described by Madison may not apply immediately to the artists in Echoes of Unity, but putting aside the reasons and motivations, each relocation stimulates a profound existential experience that we, a group of co-travelers, share. During our group sessions and one-on-one meetings, we regularly spoke about the unsettling feeling of dislocation; feeling torn between two places, which causes an emotional state of unpresence in both. Such a condition sheds a different light on liminality. If liminality points at the unclear space between departure and arrival, then we are always there. We find ourselves in a personal and shared space of echoes where we reflect on memories, beliefs, values and existence, and where we find inspiration, create art, and grow existentially.
10 November 2025
On the road from Warsaw, Poland, to Lviv, Ukraine.