Broken windows. Viewed through the magnifying glass, and what we had to give up

The multitude of enchanting (hi)stories—from Pliny’s description of the river Belus in Syrian Phoenicia to contemporary glass studies—conjure up glass and design as a sometimes tremulous yet long-enduring companionship traversing centuries and geopolitical divisions. In these corpora, Ukrainian stained-glass windows of the Soviet period are certainly not objects to be effortlessly summoned up from the inventory of researchers, though they offer a variety of illuminating accounts. As elements of the spatial design of public dwellings, they inextricably carry the visitor’s temporal awareness into the sites of their embeddedness, rendering time-place-body reciprocity and distending daily life practices beyond the architectural demarcation installed by walls. As historical artefacts, they reflect the striving for creative freedom under the imposed primacy of socialist realism and evidence the room’s existence for its outlet, shaped not merely into accord with the medium’s technical constraints but through uncharted forms of human togetherness (to overcome the scarcity of payments, materials, and instruments, the artists relied on their professional communities).

The curatorial gesture towards stained-glass windows, performed amidst the genocidal incandescent vortices set by russia’s retrotopian sentiment, wears many anticipated associations. Fragility, reflection, transparency, hope, and shattered vitrines of the looted museums in de-occupied regions might commence the list. Without negating those robes (and addressing the sites of the war atrocities in the exhibition), I would like to delineate further inflexions in engagement with Zygmunt Bauman’s admonitory works. Retrotopias draw upon the past, wherein selective forgetting and remembering enable the groups’ entitlement to territorial political sovereignty, while heritage may amplify the divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. When composing an exhibition on socialist legacies—many of which, most notably, ‘the friendship of peoples’, mutated to endorse russia’s war—one of the ways of working through the past is to follow Bauman’s empathetic ‘form of history that is constituted not by the greats but by little persons’ (as put by Leonidas Donskis). Even in Ukraine, the artists presented here are known only to a limited group of specialists. Complex histories of their work, in accord with Bauman’s thought, bear the potential to challenge the loss of sensitivity and counteract indifference. In the world of liquid fears, love, and attenuated solidarity practices, I suggest thinking about the increasing viscosity—eaning both resistance and resilience—that precedes the formation of glass, and the reconstitution of spaces of human togetherness, invoked by the in-between position of stained-glass windows, embracing both interior and exterior.