Artist: Viktoria Raykova
Medium: 120 film scan mounted on acrylic
Dimensions: 24 x 36 inches

I had to digest the war [in Ukraine] through bodies. Where were they? The bodies displaced, the bodies lost, the bodies in breakdown, the bodies numbed? Where was my body in all of this? I learned about the first bombings minutes before walking into a dance studio, and the first thing that came to me was the memory of my grandmother singing “on the 22nd of June, at exactly 4 o’clock, Kyiv was bombed, and we were told that the war had begun,” casually, as she washed the dishes. Those lyrics were about the German attack in 1941; she was twelve when she fled Ukraine. In 2022, some years after she had passed, I felt her body close. As a distant observer from the United States of warfare on lands I call home, I felt everything and nothing at once.

Excerpt from “Bodies” written by Anya Yermakova