Vernissage on Tuesday, 27 September, from 6 to 8 p.m.
In an interdisciplinary project, the artist Yona Tukuser, who works in the style of Metamodernism, interprets in her paintings the tragic consequences of hunger in the 20th century, while casting a troubled look at the present in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Yona Tukuser was born in 1986 to Bulgarian parents, in the village of Glavan in Ukraine, some 70 km from the Danube Delta. She is a descendant of a family that emigrated in 1832 from Glavan, Galabovo municipality, Stara Zagora district, Bulgaria.
For 13 years, the artist collected historical evidence of the famines in Ukraine and the Soviet Union in the periods 1921–23, 1932–33 and 1946–47, adopting an academic approach to the selection of archival sources of information. Her personal interviews with people who survived the famine, quotations from which the exhibition’s visitors will have the opportunity to read, are particularly emotive.
‘The “Hunger” project reveals that the contemporary world has become hostage to the unpunished crimes of Soviet totalitarianism and, in particular, to the repressive, anti-peasant actions that contributed to the mass starvation of the population. Philosopher George Santayana’s aphorism that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, should sound like an alarm, the power of which will be amplified by the historical paintings that are part of the project,’ commented Yona Tukuser.
