The multitude of enchanting (hi)stories\u2014from Pliny\u2019s description of the river Belus in Syrian Phoenicia to contemporary glass studies\u2014conjure 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\u2019s 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\u2019s existence for its outlet, shaped not merely into accord with the medium\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The curatorial gesture towards stained-glass windows, performed amidst the genocidal incandescent vortices set by russia\u2019s 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\u2019s admonitory works. Retrotopias draw upon the past, wherein selective forgetting and remembering enable the groups\u2019 entitlement to territorial political sovereignty, while heritage may amplify the divisions between \u2018us\u2019 and \u2018them\u2019. When composing an exhibition on socialist legacies\u2014many of which, most notably, \u2018the friendship of peoples\u2019, mutated to endorse russia\u2019s war\u2014one of the ways of working through the past is to follow Bauman\u2019s empathetic \u2018form of history that is constituted not by the greats but by little persons\u2019 (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\u2019s 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\u2014eaning both resistance and resilience\u2014that 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The multitude of enchanting (hi)stories\u2014from Pliny\u2019s description of the river Belus in Syrian Phoenicia to contemporary glass studies\u2014conjure 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"exhibition_category":[61],"countries_category":[95],"persons_tags":[],"item_tags":[51,63,64],"author_tags":[60],"class_list":["post-285","exhibition","type-exhibition","status-publish","hentry","exhibition_category-public-en","countries_category-ukraine-2","item_tags-applied-art","item_tags-architecture","item_tags-material-en","author_tags-polina-baitsym"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/retrotopia.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibition\/285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/retrotopia.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibition"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/retrotopia.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/exhibition"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/retrotopia.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibition\/285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3273,"href":"https:\/\/retrotopia.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibition\/285\/revisions\/3273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/retrotopia.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"exhibition_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/retrotopia.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibition_category?post=285"},{"taxonomy":"countries_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/retrotopia.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/countries_category?post=285"},{"taxonomy":"persons_tags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/retrotopia.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/persons_tags?post=285"},{"taxonomy":"item_tags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/retrotopia.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/item_tags?post=285"},{"taxonomy":"author_tags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/retrotopia.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/author_tags?post=285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}