Not My Room

Wartime creates living conditions where, as time goes on, personal space increasingly ends up beyond the confines of the home. The familiar walls, which had framed an intimate world, suddenly become abstractions; or rather, the once unequivocal idea of the walls and the frame being the same thing no longer holds together. War has many different ways of destroying the private, but in each instance it brings a once intimate order into the glaring light of public view, where the cozy system of domestic routine looks absurd. In wartime each person has to reinvent the concept of home, which is no longer obvious, just as domestic objects no longer attest to home being like blood, where basic human need is infused with value. Sometimes it seems like the personal items we transport from one place to another, repeatedly rearranging them in a suitcase or new room, are now inviting us to reconsider their functional significance. Everything that had once seemed necessary and in order—from domestic effects, sheets, and furniture to beloved souvenirs—is now onstage, brought to life by actors in a perverted play, where intimate memories, rules, and beliefs have been rendered unrecognizable or expertly misconstrued. All of a sudden, things that were meant to serve a person embody the secrets, hopes, and fears of their former owner’s body and miserable soul. Instead of arranging themselves for a still life, they fall apart, like organs pulled out of the body, which ought to be stuffed back in and sealed up, as if nothing had happened.

The installation’s appearance varies. The constellation of objects in Not My Room has a mutable structure, and thus creates an image of living space specific to the place where it is exhibited. Every relocation of the installation requires a re-inventory of its things: objects are added, removed, or transformed. Each successive arrangement of objects is like a scene from a play about the vain hope of turning a temporary residence into a home, when there is no way to restore the familiar comfort of prewar life as it used to be. Not My Room shows home the way it appears in dreams—transformed beyond recognition, utterly unlike the image imprinted in my memory. The installation’s mobile theatre is an admonition against the dubious propriety of feeling nostalgic, when sentimentality obscures thinking about what your home really is, what private things are worth hiding, what is shameful, what your responsibility is, what you must pay for, and what you must defend to the death.

Vlada Ralko, 2025

(Translated from Ukrainian into English by Larissa Babij)

                                                                                                                                                                                             

Affections                                                                                                                                                                                 

Stories                                                                                                                                                                                      

Selfie                                                                                                                                                                                          


Created at the a_brucke residence from the Yurii Stashkiv Foundation Chervonechorne