LITURGIE DES JOURS: SASHA KURMAZ | DANYLO HALKIN
Liturgie des jours brings together the work of Sasha Kurmaz and Danylo Halkin, two Ukrainian contemporary artists, in the gallery’s central nave. Each offers a witness to the conflict that has engulfed their daily realities, Kurmaz through a daily practice rooted in found photography and collage, and Halkin through a deep engagement with the history of stained glass in the region. Taken together they offer a prismatic and meditative encounter with the lived experience of war.
Sasha Kurmaz’ Red Horse is a ritualistic daily practice. The artist has been making collages each day since the beginning of Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He gathers found images, handwritten notes and his own photographs and layers them onto found cardboard and other materials. The series is a single work, a statement made of hundreds of individual collages that the artist has pledged to continue to make until the war stops. The first part of the work, 462 collages, is exhibited here.
The themes range from direct documentation of the destruction around him, to meditations on the psychology of violence, and the endurance of the mundane. The artist calls it “a diary of life” rather than a diary of war, reminding us that this is vital, quotidian reality — the diaristic shaping of a consciousness.
“I observe how small cracks in the social body turn into deep fissures very quickly,” he scrawls in cursive next to a blanched photograph of a ruin. With their fractured pace, his handwritten observations are like aphorisms or epithets. Half thoughts accumulate into an exploration of the internal landscape. It is a chronology of physical, social and psychic fissures, endless endings that refuse to end until the war does.
The collages are rife with art historical references. Kurmaz photographs Thomas Hirschhorn looking out over Kyiv in a 2024 diptych, then echoes Hirschhorn’s style of poignant commentary rendered in sharpie on cardboard. The back side of one day’s collage is scrawled in all caps in red: “THIS IS THE YEAR WHICH PEOPLE WILL TALK ABOUT. THIS IS THE YEAR WHICH PEOPLE WILL BE SILENT ABOUT.”
A series of black and white photographs of bombed out houses echo the clean, systematic tonality of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s water towers, but here instead of an encyclopedia of progress it is a catalogue of remnants.
“Ce n’est pas une moto,” Kurmaz writes under a photograph of a mangled motorcycle. Referencing Magritte’s surrealist commentary (“Ceci n’est pas un pipe”) but with an ever too real twist.
“People DISCUSS nighttime shelling and explosions” Kurmaz writes by hand on another day, below a photograph of young people picnicking on grass. The incongruent continuity of a quotidian practice is disjointed by how mundane conversations evolve as the war does.
Each collage is a window into the psychology of daily life in this environment. In the nave the 462 are placed in a long, endless line. It is an invitation to a silent meditation, a chance to enter the profundity of a deeply personal encounter with history.
The project was awarded the Grand Prix Images Vevey 2023/2024 and exhibited for the first time at the 2024 Biennale Images Vevey. It was published as a 800 page book by Éditions Images Vevey in November 2025, and won the 2026 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award.
Danylo Halkin’s series Optical Prostheses (2022–2025) offers an alternate sense of witnessing. Working with found stained glass from the artist’s native Dnipropetrovsk region, Halkin layers in Ukraine’s rich heritage of stained glass techniques, the history of Soviet Modernism and the current destruction. The project title references the distortion of history, and the layers of propaganda.
The stained-glass windows were used in public buildings, like hospitals, fire stations and military recruitment offices. Missile strikes and bombs have destroyed much of the region’s architectural heritage, and fissured historic stained glass works. Halkin scours online marketplaces for stained glass windows that are sold as salvage, transforming fragments of architectural heritage into autonomous artworks.
In other parts of the series, he creates monochrome paintings based on stained glass works that have been completely destroyed, stripping them of color but retaining the original detailing and narratives. Through the transposition of media, he offers a fragile, ghostly witnessing to the destruction, afterlives, and survival of these monuments.
The material of stained glass evokes a sacred, liturgical space. Taken as a whole, the work forms a meditation on everyday life and a contemplative encounter with the traces of war.
Curator | Julien Frydman
Text | Allyn Aglaïa
