The Horizon is my Diary. Group exhibition (2025)
Artists: Boris Michailov, Vlada Ralko, Volodymyr Budnikov, Eric Pawlitzky.
Fotografien, Zeichnungen, Video
Idea: Vlada Ralko
a_brücke space, Hubertusweg 60, Künstlerhof Frohnau, Gästestudio 20
The Lasting Horizon between Lightning and Thunder
I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion.
—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
There’s a joke about a person who is writing a letter to themselves. When asked what it’s about, they reply: you’ll find out when you get it. In fact, this rather comic story mirrors the process of keeping a diary, where life goes on in the time between writing and reading what you’ve written. In other words, the future depends on whether you made a conscientious effort to live your life, since you only get to read whatever haphazard fragments you hastily jotted down as a reminder once the time for action has passed. Having a sense of the historic in each moment of urgency may preclude this sad destiny, but it is extremely difficult to muster all your powers to capture the event—and yourself in it—in time, i.e., before it makes the news. Even though history is happening in this very moment, habit persuades us to understand historic being as a story about time gone by. It’s as if we were strangers to our own fate, outsiders with no hope of discovering why we are always out of sync with ourselves. We thoughtlessly consider time as “ours” but it resists. When we grasp at it, we only catch hold of its absence, emptiness, splinters of discrete moments, instead of duration. Why even today’s world, which we call “mad” with similar levity, is actually divine balance, an order that we put into the foundations of our present; and true order always arises as a bridge in times of crisis, at the edge, in moments of despair, although the desperate ones, who dare to live in history, appear mad to an outside observer. However, it’s worth remembering that the edge of the sky always aligns with our line of sight. This correspondence, which is equivalent to responsibility, is the only guarantee we have of assembling the multiple truths arriving at different speeds into one reality. There is a point between thunder and lightning, which lasts but an instant, where we are the knot uniting our time into one. From this vantage point a black cloud, which presaged the storm, also promises a rainbow over the horizon to come.
Vlada Ralko, 2025
(Translated from Ukrainian into English by Larissa Babij)
Photo: Eric Pawlitzky, Vlada Ralko
Created at the a_brucke residence from the Yurii Stashkiv Foundation Chervonechorne