Where We Begin

Where We Begin is a time-based, site-responsive installation that marks a shift in the artist's practice from articulating loss toward exploring rebuilding as an ongoing and unresolved process. Developed in dialogue with the earlier work My Wallpaper. Fragments of a Lost Home, the installation repositions its material language toward questions of how life, memory, and responsibility are reassembled after destruction.

The work centres on photographic wallpaper depicting ruined residential buildings, damaged interiors, and traces of everyday domestic life interrupted by war in Ukraine. Rather than forming a fully immersive environment, the wallpaper remains partially intact and partially torn from the wall. This act of peeling functions both as a gesture of release from accumulated physical and emotional scars and as an acknowledgment that traces of trauma persist and cannot be fully removed.

Found objects originating from destroyed homes in Ukraine are integrated into the installation. Furniture elements and architectural fragments retain the scale and intimacy of lived space, grounding the work in material reality. Ceramic bricks emerge among these objects as provisional structures, proposing rebuilding not as restoration, but as an open-ended process that begins while ruins remain visible.

The installation brings together adult and childlike registers. While the bricks reference construction and play, mark-making by the artist's daughter introduces gestures of continuity and future orientation. These elements allow new, affirmative memories to coexist with, rather than erase, older painful ones.

Where We Begin approaches rebuilding as a layered and non-linear process involving both the release of trauma and its material encapsulation. The installation incorporates around 200 ceramic bricks, whose number and configuration shift throughout the exhibition, forming a gesture of slow rebuilding and the gradual emergence of new future realities.