Jeanne Gaigher, Youssra Raouchi,
Sofiia Yesakova
'Memories we have forgotten'

To the awareness of the whims of the individual, entangled in their private hells, desperately striving for the assertion of their integral being and unconscious against the alienating rules and conventions of society, the Moroccan artist Youssra Raouchi seems to respond by digging through an inner search that, laid bare and tragically stretched between the delirium of shouted words from the incommunicability of an external world and one’s own identity, amid monsters with canine appearances and dreamlike settings, she would like to deliver to contemporaneity.

In the deafening silence of a missile launched by a drone, in the iron and beams of bombed cities, in the symbol of a cross blending iconography, religion, and military technology, the works of the War Landscape series in the optic of icons Instant, created in recent months by Ukrainian artist Sofiia Yesakova and exhibited, sometimes in pairs, sometimes individually, invite us to remember everything that, once again, seems to have been forgotten.

The Western rationalism, the artist emphasizes, functions as a myth: we try our best to ignore the imminence of catastrophe. We do not want to remember and revisit violence as it truly appears. The only way to respond to the constant challenges that the present poses is to radically change the very principle of our thinking and lived experience. But the clearer it becomes about what is really happening, the greater our refusal to recognize it, seems.

To the awareness of the whims of the individual, entangled in their private hells, desperately striving for the assertion of their integral being and unconscious against the alienating rules and conventions of society, the Moroccan artist Youssra Raouchi seems to respond by digging through an inner search that, laid bare and tragically stretched between the delirium of shouted words from the incommunicability of an external world and one’s own identity, amid monsters with canine appearances and dreamlike settings, she would like to deliver to contemporaneity.

In the deafening silence of a missile launched by a drone, in the iron and beams of bombed cities, in the symbol of a cross blending iconography, religion, and military technology, the works of the War Landscape series in the optic of icons Instant, created in recent months by Ukrainian artist Sofiia Yesakova and exhibited, sometimes in pairs, sometimes individually, invite us to remember everything that, once again, seems to have been forgotten.

The Western rationalism, the artist emphasizes, functions as a myth: we try our best to ignore the imminence of catastrophe. We do not want to remember and revisit violence as it truly appears. The only way to respond to the constant challenges that the present poses is to radically change the very principle of our thinking and lived experience. But the clearer it becomes about what is really happening, the greater our refusal to recognize it, seems.