SASHA KURMAZ

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 at La Patinoire Royale Bach in Liturgie des Jours. 

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The collages are rife with art historical references.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.

Sasha Kurmaz is an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, video, artists' books, participatory practices, performance, and public intervention. His work explores urban space, collective and personal trauma, the impact of war on individual and collective identities, and the relationship between the individual and structures of power. He received the Grand Prix Images Vevey (2023), the Kazimir Malevich Artist Award (2020), and the C/O Berlin Talent Award (2016). He lives and works in Kyiv.

Selected solo exhibitions: Stadtgalerie Künstlerhaus, Lauenburg (2024); PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv (2016); C/O Berlin (2016).

Selected group exhibitions: C/O Berlin (2025); Museo Civico del Risorgimento, Bologna (2025); Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Oaxaca (2024); Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle (2023); Albertinum – Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (2023); Ukrainian Pavilion, 18th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice (2023); DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague (2022); Museum Folkwang, Essen (2022); Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2022); Saatchi Gallery, London (2015); ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe (2013); CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2013); W139, Amsterdam (2012).