Stolen Voice of Ukraine

This installation engages with the silencing of Ukrainian culture through the figure of Mykhailo Boichuk, whose life and work were systematically erased by Soviet repression. Drawing on rare archival materials obtained from the archive of the Security Service of Ukraine, the work focuses on the final chapter of Boichuk's life, revealing how the pursuit of cultural autonomy was criminalised and destroyed. Executed in 1937 and posthumously rehabilitated in 1958, Boichuk's fate stands as a concentrated example of the broader historical violence directed at Ukrainian artists and intellectuals.

The installation brings together nearly 500 reproduced pages from Boichuk's case file, including interrogation protocols, sentencing documents, execution records, and rehabilitation verdicts. Selected materials are translated into English and presented alongside documents etched onto copper surfaces treated with fire, as well as archival copies. Through this material transformation, the archive is displaced from a purely documentary register and reconfigured as a spatial and tactile experience, where endurance, erasure, and delayed justice coexist.

Rather than presenting history as a closed chapter, Stolen Voice of Ukraine positions archival evidence as an active site of memory. The work reflects on repression not only as an act of physical destruction, but as a sustained process of silencing through the removal of voice, language, and visibility. By reintroducing these documents into the present, the installation insists on continuity between past and present struggles over cultural identity, truth, and historical responsibility.