Marta Hryniuk

 

 

exhibition view, Instant Soup and Salo, New Grounds, Kunstfort Maastricht, 3-20.10.2024

Instant soup and salo is a multi-channel audiovisual installation, which tells two parallel stories in post-full scale invasion Ukraine: Oksana is a psychologist and dance teacher at the Centre for Creativity, a community space in Kosiv, west Ukraine, now repurposed as a hub for volunteers to make soup, salo and camouflage nets for the front lines. Margarita is an artist and volunteer medic, working to evacuate wounded soldiers, civilians and animals, while still maintaining her practice as a painter. The piece is a meditation on resistance, the role of art in extreme times, and the ways in which people relate to or make sense of war.

Instant soup and salo explicitly brings together the activist and filmmaking strands of our work for the first time, depicting the Ukrainian ‘home front’ of the war, specifically women who organise and resist the ongoing invasion. With this installation, we look for a visual and spatial setup which corresponds with our “multimodal” approach during the filming and editing of the work, employing heterogeneous media and working organically in response to circumstances. This approach was inspired by Oksana and Margarita, the women whose voices we hear in the film.