‘When leaving Alchevs’k, Marko Kolomytskyi arranged for a large family archive spanning from the 1960s to 2026 to be evacuated. In the exhibition, he presents a selection of images from 1995 to 2026 under the title ARCHIVE A3. Wedding photographs, birthdays, walks, New Year celebrations, and ordinary scenes unfold before us. Gradually, an entire family history comes into view. Then something shifts. Beginning in 2014, photographs abruptly give way to administrative documents: bills, receipts, identity papers, certificates. It is as though the bureaucracy of war progressively invades the space of memory. The outside world enters directly into familial intimacy. It becomes impossible to maintain a clear separation between political history and everyday existence.

Looking closely at the series, one realizes that this intrusion had already been present beforehand, though in latent form. The artist subtly introduces political events that gradually announce the coming catastrophe: energy tensions and the so-called “gas wars” between Russia and Ukraine, presidential elections, military rhetoric, nuclear threats, and finally the outbreak of war in 2014. These elements pass through ordinary images before progressively overtaking the entire space through the bureaucracy of occupation.

In the face of these intrusions, Marko Kolomytskyi’s work seems to affirm that continuity remains possible, and that forms of tenderness may still persist amid violence and rupture. His work reflects a particular attentiveness to the complex past of his family, his country, and his own trajectory. At a time when dominant narratives increasingly flatten identities and histories, Marko Kolomytskyi instead seeks to preserve their complexity. The mosaic of fragments composing the exhibition becomes a way of reflecting on what shapes us, while also questioning the often blurred boundaries between our personal histories and those of the territories from which we come.’