Featured Artists:
Polina Kuznetsova
Oleh Kalashnik
Aza Nizi Maza Studio
Oleksandr Liapin
Kostiantyn Lyzohub
Denis Sarazhin
Kostiantyn Zorkin
Andriy Bludov
Mykhailo Alekseenko
Ave Libertatemaveamor
Feb. 24-Mar. 3, New York
RSVP
If you were assigned to explain life on Earth in a single concise message, what would you choose to include?
“One time, during one of their ambitious projects, NASA sent Voyager spacecrafts outside the borders of the solar system. In case they ever meet an alien civilization, each spacecraft was equipped with gold-covered copper vinyl records with information about humans and our planet Earth…” from Wikipedia.
The NASA record contained greetings in many languages, the sound of a human heartbeat, Bach’s music, the sound of the wind, a picture of a mother with her child… People are so beautiful and sweet.
The record certainly had no mention of war and violence – of course, this would be too unpleasant for our first impression on aliens.
But what about us, people, here on Earth? How can we communicate with each other? How can we explain to each other how to navigate life and death, what values to stand for, and what to be afraid of?
Passing experience is a hard and ungrateful task. No matter how hard we study history and try to move forward from our mistakes, everything still gets back to where it started. No matter how many fairy tales we read to our children, at some point, a new tyrant is born, and humanity circles back to violence. Civilizations flourish and crumble, and new ones replace them. And in between, there is always a war.
What a pleasure it is to be able to just drift your thoughts away from this planet. To travel across time and space, where there are no feelings, no pain, no good, no evil – nothing but cold, eternal beauty.
There is the Sun, and in its radiant light, a pale blue dot.
This is our Earth.
Here is our home on Earth.
And our home is burning.
Living close to war is similar to being next to a black hole. Time and space are distorted and changed. What used to be mundane is now impossible, and what seemed to be impossible becomes integral. A year passes by in a blink of an eye, and a single moment can be frozen for what seems to be like forever.
This dark abyss is incomprehensible and unable to be seen. There is no signal behind the event horizon, and therefore no way it’ll reach the spectator. They will never be shown how it is, to be there, on the front line. And the darkness expands with every new body that falls into it.
This project is “The Time Capsule – a Golden Record”, sent into eternal, endless space in search of contact.
– Polina Kuznetsova, Curator, Artists
The Time Capsule – a Golden Record is organized with the support of Razom for Ukraine, an association launching charity initiatives aimed at providing financial aid to wives and children of Ukrainian heroes who gave their lives defending Ukraine from Russian aggression.
