Performative sculpture installation by Maria Kulikovska - Save Ukraine - «Amazing Stories of Crimea»

Stardust
Performative sculpture installation. The art project was especially created for the exhibition «Amazing Stories of Crimea». In a collection of Mystetskyi Arsenal. Kyiv, Ukraine, 2019.

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Performative sculpture installation «Stardust» was created during January-February of 2019 in connection with the 5 years since Russia illegally annexed Crimea. It's been 5 years since Maria Kulikovska was last at home with her family. The installation «Stardust» became the final part of the exposition of the exhibition «Amazing Stories of Crimea» in Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv, Ukraine. The exhibition was held from 26 February to 5 May 2019 and was planned according to the principle of the inverse timeline of the life and traditions of all ancient people that lived on the Crimean Peninsula.

https://www.mariakulikovska.net

This huge installation is an artist's loose interpretation of the map of the Kerch Peninsula (125 sqm of the peninsula model). The five life-sized figures were cast from the Kulikovska's body and were created by the same materials as soil of the metaphorical landscape of the installation: metal, wood, minerals, stone dust, sand, chamotte, natural stone pigments, iron oxides, sea salt and special supplements, various types of granite dust, cement and soil. The video from photos of the sky above Kerch Peninsula at different times of the day was shown on the wall behind sculptures. It was created by scanning photos from the personal archive of the artist.

«I am the first of my family, who was physically born in Crimea. But, like everyone else, almost the entire population of Kerch, Crimea is the migrants, who created civilizations on a very special land for thousands of years of its history. Therefore, this project is about people and land. It's about people who have become land and landscape, and about land turns into people. Therefore, all the sculptures are created from the same material as the landscape – the model of the Kerch Peninsula, - Kulikovska explained. - All of us, inhabitants of the Earth, are stardust. And we are all created by the migration of the remains of stars. Can we, just ordinary dust particles, build boundaries between each other, hate each other, disrespect each other, begin wars and kill each other? Crimea is a unique land, where the greatest multitude of different cultures and nationalities are gathered. This land is full of different colors of people and cultures. This land is part and continuation of the same multicultural and multinational Ukraine».

“ – Mama, what is there beyond the horizon, where the water ends? Is there the Edge of the World?
– No, my dear, there is no Edge of the World.
– There the water runs out and then there is Nothing?
– No, there begins another, big water.
– So what is next?
– And then begins big oceans and big lands of fabulous countries and states.
– What is there, from the side where the endless scorched steppe, and at night the cicadas are pouring their ringing trill and crickets light the way to a lonely wanderer along the sandy path strewn with shards and remains of past civilizations; where the waves of salty blue water wash the purple-yellow shores and the sultry heat of noon is replaced by the coolness of the night, spreading in the lunar path of light beckoning and disappearing beyond the horizon of unseen land? What is there?
– There this steppe passes into the steppe of another, Our, but bigger Earth, and further merges with the Greatest Earth, the one where your grandmother was born, where I was born, where you once will go to try your luck.
– We are all alone here... They, there – on the Greatest Earth – know that we are here?
– All We are only a mirage, wandering stardust.
TO GRANDMOTHER AND PARENTS BY MARIA KULIKOVSKA

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