OLGA KRYKUN

Galerie NoD
Olga Krykun
Days, Months, Years
Curated by: Pavel Kubesa
January 15 – February 14, 2025
Opening: January 14, 2025

Days, Months, Years by Olga Krykun
PK:
Olga, your current exhibition project Days, Months, Years at Galerie NoD combines your deeply
personal experiences, emotions, and perceptions with broader socio-political reflections, primarily
linked to your direct personal experience of the war in Ukraine. In the exhibition, you present a
series of paintings that do not depict specific war realities but rather bring forth a distinctive poetics
—a blend of dreamscapes, pagan mythologies, and ritual practices. What is the specific genealogy
of this series, which has emerged over the past two years of Russian aggression in Ukraine?
OK:
The Days, Months, Years series is directly connected to my previous series, Forget-me-nots, whose
paintings were an immediate and urgent response to the invasion of Ukraine. But that was already,
quite literally, “a long time ago”—it’s been nearly three years. That’s why my current work and its
meaning have shifted slightly; it’s now more about “the memory of this war.” The individual
paintings, often framed in handcrafted frames, were created over a long period, continuously
between 2023 and 2024, much like those handmade and decorated frames. That’s also reflected in
the exhibition’s title—Days, Months, Years—which conveys their character and process of creation.
In essence, these paintings are diaries of feelings and emotions that I, as a Ukrainian woman living
long-term in the Czech Republic, experience in direct confrontation with the ongoing war. But it
goes beyond just emotions.
PK:
Olga, I’d like to take a step back and reflect a little. I feel that our conversation will, at multiple
points, revolve around memory and looking into the past. Our first encounter dates back to 2017,
when you had an exhibition here at NoD in the now-defunct Video NoD, a space dedicated to the
presentation of digital moving images. That was a phase in your artistic career when you were
focused on digital imagery. Over the years, you’ve worked on projects involving video art, artistic
film, installation, and object-based works. However, in your recent work, and especially in this
exhibition, you present yourself primarily as a painter. I’m interested in this artistic evolution of
yours—the role of painting in your continuous practice. Did you arrive at it gradually, was it a
natural progression, or was painting always an inherent part of your work?
OK:
Painting has always been there. I’ve been painting since childhood. I attended an art-focused
elementary school, and my high school was also art-oriented. It’s something I can’t erase, and I
can’t imagine my artistic thinking without painting. But, of course, my university environment also
shaped me—I studied in the Intermedia and later Supermedia studios at UMPRUM. That broadened
my horizons; I was full of enthusiasm for making art that was digital, conceptual, intermedia, or
multimedia. There was also a strong influence of post-internet art, which fascinated and interested
me. However, at that time, the whole situation with the internet—and our relationship with it—was
vastly different from today. Now, with the increasing influence of AI, we’ve arrived at a completely
different place.

Back then, I enjoyed working with concepts closer to the early internet, engaging with principles
and themes of Web 2.0, which framed my adolescence. I’ve always painted, but I was also an online
kid—I loved coding and creating websites. So even though I now primarily express myself through
painting, I still find myself “somewhere in between”—between digital art and painting. At the same
time, I could define my approach as a personal form of what I’d call expressive naive art, through
which I explore the digital as a subject. That connects my current painting practice with my
previous works, which were largely based on installation strategies—I continuously create with
digital themes in mind.
PK:
In what sense do you mean “digital themes”?
OK:
My first painting series, E-girl Melancholy, stemmed from my perception of TikTok as a platform.

At the same time, by referencing the format of selfie photography, it reflected on themes of self-
acceptance and self-perception. But gradually, my paintings became more infused with reflections

on the experience of war—witnessing it through online platforms from the perspective of a woman.
Although I have traveled to Ukraine several times for short periods during the war, my primary way
of following its progress has been through the internet, especially in the early days of the conflict.
PK:
So, for you, it’s predominantly a “digital experience”?
OK:
Yes. It’s often said that this is the first war happening live on TikTok—you can watch footage
directly from the trenches on both sides. At the same time, there’s both positive and negative
content on the platform. Propaganda is, of course, present, but people also use this digital space to
mobilize and inform themselves. It’s a new medium, a new technology. And this war has also
become, to a certain extent, digital—it’s a cyber war, with numerous cyberattacks occurring. My
paintings capture experiences; they are—like we mentioned before—personal diaries, records of
someone who perceives all of this in its full scope, with the online experience playing a crucial role.
PK:
I’m interested in this act of balancing and materializing—how you translate the dominance of
digital experience into something tangible, into the physical handling of real materials, fixing a
specific experience and its emotional reflection into a material object—a painting.
OK:
Yes, it’s literally an escape back to reality. I like that I can create something physical with my
hands, especially since, despite being a painter, I spend too much time working on my computer—
or on my phone. It’s similar to the pandemic period when I also returned to painting because, during
social isolation, projects based on artistic collaboration—something that’s very important to me—
weren’t possible. Painting gives me a certain freedom: I can create art whenever I want or need to.
And painting as a format is much more controllable. In today’s chaotic world, where so much feels
out of control, painting is a way for me to regain a sense of control—even if it’s just knowing that,
at worst, I can roll up a canvas and take it with me. And, of course, there’s the freedom and
flexibility—painting requires very little to begin.
PK:
The title of the exhibition, Days, Months, Years, to me, suggests a creeping experience—something
that transforms from a single day into the horizon of a lifetime, something that “unfortunately
endures.” It also reflects the theme of time, which manifests in your paintings in multiple ways—
not just in their creation process (a diary of wartime emotions), but also in recurring symbols:

flowers, dolls, vases, clocks... These can all be seen as archetypal objects that, in a certain
interpretive sense, relate to a finite time of life—a doll as a symbol of childhood’s transience, a
flower representing fleeting beauty, a braided lock of hair as a symbol of femininity and
impermanence, a sundial alluding to the passage of time and cosmic constants. What do these
symbols mean to you, and why do you use them in relation to your experience of the war in Ukraine
and its memory?
OK:
I started using flowers in the Forget-me-nots series. That was already about time—forget-me-nots
literally mean “don’t forget me.”
PK:
So, flowers that say “remember me.”
OK:
Yes. And I named the series that way precisely at the beginning of the invasion when Ukraine was
truly in all the "headlines," but at the same time, I knew that one day, sooner or later, it would
disappear from those headlines. And even if it didn’t, I never wanted to forget this experience. And I
don’t want people to forget it either. This is also because, even though these were the worst times,
there was still a hint of something positive: people united, collaborated, and there was a sense of
loyalty. And not just in Ukraine but also here in the Czech Republic. We all lived through this
situation together; we were in shock together. It was a collective experience. Forget-me-nots means
not to forget, while Days, Months, Years points to the fact that it is still ongoing. And even when it
does end, something will remain, and there will always be something we should—or will not be
able to—forget. To me, the entire history of humanity is about carrying traumas from the past that
are processed over and over again, with the cycle of wars returning and fading away.
Both paintings with the second element you mentioned—the clock paintings—are important to me:
Your Time is Up and Not Much Time Left (both 2024). Both—including their titles—are poetic on
one hand, but also serve as warnings. They reference how, throughout history, humanity keeps
making mistakes while simultaneously falling into the illusion that we have plenty of time, even
when, in reality, we have none left. And perhaps, given today’s context, there’s no need to specify
this further.
PK:
It’s simply something constant.
OK:
And it’s also connected to the fact that I’m experiencing my own age—this is the first time in my
life that I’m beginning to think about my mortality. When you're in your twenties, you feel
immortal, but when you suddenly turn thirty, you start realizing, "Oh! I’m not that immortal after
all." And time itself suddenly takes on a completely different dimension. Everything I’ve been
doing for the past five years is about some kind of personal, intimate story through which I try to
reflect the world—or rather, talk about big themes through my own private and deep experiences.
PK:
One more thing comes to mind, and that is the role of the feminine element in your paintings, which
I perceive as very strong. (The entire conversation takes place in the NoD café, overlooking the
intersection of Dlouhá and Rybná streets, above which, since the beginning of the Russian invasion
of Ukraine, an art installation by Veronika Psotková called VINOK—Ukrainian вінок—has been
displayed, dedicated to Ukrainian women and mothers affected by the horrors and losses caused by
the war in Ukraine. A "vinok" is a traditional Ukrainian headdress that has become a symbol of
reverence, Mother Earth, and has evolved into a symbol of glory, victory, happiness, success, peace,

chastity, youth, and femininity. The Ukrainian vinok has thus become a cultural symbol of the
Ukrainian nation throughout history. Its popularity in contemporary Ukraine significantly increased
after the events of 2014—the annexation of Crimea—and the Russian invasion in 2022.)
How do you, Olga, perceive the role of women and mothers in this entire war conflict and in the
reflection of this aggression?
OK:
Women play an incredibly interesting and important role. That’s precisely why I worked with the
symbol of dolls in my Forget-me-nots series. When the invasion began, many young men and boys
went to fight, but some women also left. On a broader scale, however, one could say that at that
moment, women gained a significant privilege—for the first time in an unimaginably long time,
women actually gained any privilege at all—the ability to repeatedly travel abroad and return. And
that’s a big deal—to be able to perceive the conflict from both the outside and directly within our
land. It completely transforms your awareness of what is truly happening.
Many of my friends and acquaintances working in culture started organizing themselves in various
online chats, where we immediately discussed how and what we would communicate outward, how
we would inform the West about the entire situation. Many of us worked in film or other creative
industries. This led to the creation of videos and Instagram carousels through which we shared
information with each other and with the world about our situation.
At the same time, for example, when you travel by bus or train in Ukraine, you only meet women
because only women are allowed to cross the borders. It’s incredibly powerful—some kind of
special feeling—that, through such details, opens up enormous discussions in our society: people
are slowly starting to "realize" and ask, for example, whether women should also go to fight.
And because this war is happening "online," I also find the topic of female veterans incredibly
powerful. Soldiers—both male and female—are often literally influencers with hundreds of
thousands of followers, which allows them to influence society. There are women with PhDs who
used to work in culture and can now speak to international media as "educated women from the
front line."
There are also many women who have lost limbs and continue to function with bionic prosthetics.
And they share all of this on social media. It’s incredibly empowering—encouraging, inspiring—
they have the strength to make an impact, to keep living. Today, war, in connection with the theme
of women, has opened such an enormous field of possibilities that it cannot be contained within a
single exhibition.

Olga Krykun & Pavel Kubesa
Prague
January 6, 2025