Garden of Memory: Artists: Fedir Alexandrovich, Ukraine- Iryna Alexandrovich, Ukraine- Ruth Biller, Germany. Garden of Memory is an exhibition space built as a living metaphor of a garden through which a river of forgetting flows. The exhibition’s three locations are not three separate rooms, but three stages of a single movement: from face-to name, from name- to dissolution, from dissolution- to rebirth. At the foot of the garden lies Lethe. Books of life, stitched from fates, names, and faces, stream downward. and, before the viewer’s eyes, transform into a narrow, glowing strip of foil- a river of forgetting that is at once the death of memory and its recasting into a new, now immortal, form. This is not disappearance, it is metamorphosis: memory, no longer held by paper, begins to flow like metal and light.

Location1 Garden of Faces

Quick ink portraits of the fallen friends of Fedir Alexandrovich– people he knew personally, whose faces he managed to catch in a few strokes of the brush while they were still alive in his memory. Their names are written not on plaques, but on watermelon leaves- fragile, green, short-lived, like the lives they mark. It is precisely from beneath these leaves, beneath the names, that Lethe begins to flow: the books steam down, dissolve, become foil. The name on the leaf is the point from which memory either holds – or is carried off by the current of forgetting. 

Location2 Portraits of Bread and bird

Large portraits of those who died for Ukraine – Lithuanians, Bulgarians, Poles..Each holds in their hands the national bread of their homeland, and beside it, the national bird. Bread and bird here are not ethnographic detail, but two ways of recognizing a person even after their face has faded from the world’s memory:  bread as what fed their home, the bird as what flew over their sky . These are portraits of recognition – memory – „so that we do not  forget their faces“ – and, at the same time, so that we do not forget the land from which they came to defend a foreign one.