The Body of the City

fabric, acrylic | Produced especially for the exhibition "Sense of Safety" | Donated to the YermilovCentre collection / 2024

In her painting, Kateryna Lysovenko explores the possibilities of language - how to speak and be heard by those who are numbed by pain, suffer constant traumatisation, exclusion, and various forms of oppression. Her art depicts landscapes of the bleeding and wounded mythical creatures in various circumstances - their births and deaths fused into a complex tangle of interdependencies. Her practice gives a space to speak to fragile, vulnerable beings whose existence is often instrumentalised and dehumanised. Kateryna Lysovenko's artistic practice can be described as a praxis of caring, creating a safe but fragile space to represent those whose voices are not heard.

Unlike her previous works, in The Body of the City Kateryna Lysovenko does not depict mystical creatures; on the contrary, the center of the painting portrays people. Their bodies are transparent, slightly marked, but not inscribed in detail, and they emerge from the canvas like ancient frescoes or cave paintings. Through this transparency, the artist emphasises human existence's vitality, fragility, and the permeable, disquieting boundary between human and non-human agents. Feminist optics, from which Kateryna Lysovenko's artistic practice grows like trees from the soil, questions the hierarchical relationship between subject and object and the possibility of establishing this boundary. Reflecting on her experience of being in Kyiv during the war and the bombings, the artist stresses the disproportionality of weapons to the human body. In this context, where weapons can destroy both individual human beings and an entire city, the human body and the body of the city become one. The urban area can be grasped as a juxtaposition of human and non-human bodies.

The dome that covers this iconographic group of people highlights the ambivalence of safety: on the one hand, it refers to the pregnant mother's stomach, on the other hand, this thin anxious red line is fragile and unsettling, requires continuous care, risks disappearing.