
After WWII, the Polish authorities made significant efforts to make our country homogeneous in terms of nationality. The Germans were displaced from Gdańsk and western cities. After 1968, Polish Jews were forced to leave. And we did it. For decades, we lived only in our own sauce, getting used to thinking that this was the right situation. In practice, however, it turned out that it was not and resulted in increasing xenophobia. Poles, unaccustomed to citizens with a foreign appearance, felt threatened in their presence and it happened that they expressed their emotions through aggression. It was not nice…
This situation has gradually changed in recent years. Economic immigrants started to arrive in Poland. The most numerous groups came from Ukraine. Last year, their number reached one and a half million. In fine, the war in Ukraine swept away demographic homogeneity. Refugees from across the eastern border have come en masse to settle in Poland if only to wait out the turmoil in their country. Currently, it is 3.6 million people.
They mainly go to big cities. One of them is Gdańsk, with a population of 470,000 at the end of last year. Currently, 158,000 Ukrainians live here. So, every fourth person met on the street comes from a country invaded by the Russian army.
And it turned out that we deal with strangeness. Even historical resentments have been suspended. The newcomers make their lives with us. Some people manage to continue working in their profession. I look especially at those of them who worked in the cultural sphere at home. Hence, today I am posting an interview with the curator and art researcher Natalia Revko.
Tell me briefly about yourself. What did you do before the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
I am from Odesa, and I lived there most of my life. I worked as a researcher, curator, and head of an NGO. As a researcher, I worked on the history of local contemporary art in Odesa, mostly with the Odesa conceptualism and the period of the 1990s, the time when Ukraine gained Independence and the first contemporary art institutions and curated projects emerged. It was also a time of development of different media like video art, installation, and performance. For a few years, I worked as an archivist and project manager at the Museum of Odesa Modern Art, but for me, it was important to have my independent practice as a curator. Therefore, together with friends and colleagues, we launched an NGO Slushni Rechi.
We made different projects for emerging artists and supported the local artistic community. The first project was a Sound Art Laboratory in the Botanical Garden. We collaborated with biologists, philosophers, and artists to make sound installations and performances.




Project „Tender Plants: Sound Art Laboratory in Botanical Garden”, Odesa, 2020. Courtesy Natalia Revko.
Another project, “Schlagbaum”, was organized together with partners from Germany. It was an artistic exchange built around memories of the 1990s in Germany and Ukraine. We invited people who were born in the late 1980s – early 1990s to reflect on how growing up during this time influenced us.
When did you come to Poland?
On March 14th. When the war began, I was in Kyiv with my boyfriend, and we decided to leave the city because it was quite terrifyingly there. We went to the Western part of Ukraine and spent some time there. Then I decided to come to Poland.
Right to Gdańsk?
Yes, I had an invitation from the Laznia Center for Contemporary Art to participate in their residency. When the war started a lot of possibilities for residencies emerged, but I was not able to apply. I was very stressed. But then the Laznia CCA contacted me, and therefore I came to Poland.
Tell me about the exhibition „I can talk only about the war / I can talk not only about the war” that you organized here.
This exhibition includes some contradictions in its name. It was about the situation when even if you are not talking about the war, you are still doing it.

It was quite accidental that the space was free for one month. As I understood, it does not happen in Laznia so often. I met six artists from Ukraine, and I understood that it would be particularly good to put this accidence of meeting people in very new situations into the exhibition space. Therefore, I decided to make an open call and I asked people to join. It was important for me to make a communication space among the Ukrainian and Polish artists. So, the project grew to twenty-three participants.

Also, I asked artists to bring artworks throughout the exhibition duration. Therefore, we were rearranging the space all the time. It was a valuable part of this project.
Was the exhibition changing?
Yes, it was changing itself a lot.
So, it was processual?
Yes. It was very much process based.
There was one artwork with plants. Tanya Bakum sowed sunflower seeds at the exhibition space. There were a lot of contexts around this gesture connected to the symbolic and economic value of sunflowers in Ukraine, but also with the viral video, where a woman came to an armed Russian soldier asking what he was doing on her land. After some unintelligible answers, she told him to at least put raw sunflower seeds into his pockets so they will grow when he dies.

But also, this work was a metaphor for our exhibition. Sunflowers grew as the project was developing. These days Tanya is going to plant them next to Laznia. I hope that the project will continue in other spaces and then we will show a video with this sowing sunflower seeds.
It was a difficult exhibition not only because of the very personal and sensitive theme but also because of its challenging format. It is complicated to deal with so many voices, and sometimes there were contradictions among them, even discussions, but still, I see it as a platform more than a final exhibition. More as the space for communication, working together, processing the trauma, meeting people, integrating different communities, and creating our community. It was more like an archive of reactions.

I was thinking a lot about this. And my conclusion is that this exhibition should have been organized, even if it was not ideal, and did not have this “contemporary art style”. The space was full of works and full of voices. But still, I think that the fact that it happened, as well as all these communications around, is the most valuable part of this project.
How long will your residency last here?
I was proposed to stay here for half of the year. Maybe I will stay a little bit more, maybe less. In a few days, I plan to go to Ukraine for a few weeks to see my friends and family.
When we met the first time, you told me that you had had proposals to go for residencies in some Western countries. Why didn’t you go there?
The few invitations that I received looked like good proposals at first sight. I am not saying that all the residencies like these, but those that were offered had names like “Stand for Ukraine” or “Emergency project for Ukraine” but proposing stays together with Russian artists and curators, and I am not open to this kind of collaborations now. I think that this attitude to reconciling the Ukrainians and the Russians at this moment is very inappropriate and traumatic for Ukrainians. And the proposition that I received here, in Poland, was … Nobody here asked me to communicate in a way, which I do not want and with someone, I do not want.
And I like Gdańsk. For me, it is especially important to interact with the place as deeply as I can. I am very into developing my relations with the city, with people, and with different communities. And not just to jump from one residency to another. This is fine, too, but I am not this type of person. And now it is quite stressful to take part in short-term residencies not only for me but for all art practitioners with whom I talked.
What are you working on now?
I am drafting an article for “Ręcznik” magazine about this exhibition. I am also preparing some materials for a project with the Canadian artist Kandis Friesen which will take place in Berlin. We were working on the exhibition in Odesa before and it will take place when it will be safe enough. In this other show, we both working with the experience of displacement. Kandis is working on her family story, and I am on the things that are happening with me right now.
Now I am writing about the double perception, because, for me, the world is doubled in a way. I realized that my brain is trying to catch something similar in Gdansk to my city, creating strange similarities. Maybe it is one of the ways to cope with trauma. It is interesting because when the war started, I was in the middle of writing about the doubled perception of Odesa artists, sometimes caused by the experience of living in the Soviet Union and creating imaginary spaces to escape, sometimes it was used as a method to move the borderlines of language and image. And now I am putting all this together: my personal experience and art history of Odesa that influenced me so much after all years of research.
Also, together with Bartosz Ziemniak, who took part in the exhibition, we are planning to arrange a long-standing artistic residency in Gdańsk for the Ukrainian artists. So, we are writing grant proposals and if everything is fine, I will work on this project to help artists who need a stay.
I am also working on a project addressing the environmental wounds caused by the war in Ukraine. Before I was developing a project around the ecology and geopolitics of the Black Sea, but now together with a team in Ukraine, we decided to expand this initiative. So, it will be the range of the artworks, texts, and lectures to react to unimaginable losses of landscape, nuclear threat, pollution endured by Ukraine along with the terrible loss of human lives.
So, as you can see, a lot of ideas…
And when the war ends, are you going to return to Odesa?
Yes. Before I planned to apply for an additional master’s program to continue my art education. But maybe I will apply next year. I want to return and develop my small NGO. During the war, I realized that I do not see myself in big institutions in Ukraine. I am a more local-rooted person. For me, it is particularly important to continue my practice independently.
I dream to find and rent a space in Odesa. I understood that before I was doing projects more by myself and less in teams. Now I feel more consolidation and motivation among friends and colleagues with whom I plan to work. We want to build.
It was one of the toughest decisions for me to leave Ukraine and I still do not know if it was the right decision to do. But I calm myself that I will develop my resources, knowledge, and contacts to return to Ukraine to build something. Our country needs to rebuild cities, and places to live, but we also need to build relations, and connections, strengthening ourselves as active communities and I see myself as a person who can be useful in it.
Thank you very much for the interview.