The Escape

The Escape is an installation built from restored personal belongings carried by Yuliia Holovatiuk-Ungureanu and her children when they were forced to flee their home on February 24, 2022. Clothes, bags, and a baby stroller are suspended from barbed wire, reconstructing a moment of abrupt displacement and the material reality of leaving under threat. The objects are ordinary, yet charged by the circumstances that transformed them into necessities of survival.

A coat taken in haste, a bag packed without certainty, a stroller intended for everyday walks – each item bears the imprint of urgency and fear. The act of restoration does not return these belongings to their former neutrality; instead, it exposes the tension between care and damage, preservation and loss. Barbed wire cuts through the installation as a material boundary, opposing intimacy with violence and underscoring the vulnerability of bodies and lives in transit.

The work reflects on forced migration as a rupture that redefines value, memory, and belonging. The Escape asks what remains essential when home is no longer a place but a condition of uncertainty, and how identity is carried through objects when continuity is broken. The installation frames survival not as abstraction, but as a lived, material experience shaped by constraint and resilience.