About

One hundred years ago, Mykola Khvylovy, hailed as ‘the father of modern Ukrainian prose’, penned a poem that cast a futuristic eye over the landscape of the 1920s as it unfolded. His words eloquently paraphrased the age-old expression ‘Ex Oriente Lux’ – an homage to the romanticist dispute of the 19th century – regarding whether the Russian Empire (which included Ukraine at the time) could join the European vector or would instead see its cultural identity dissolved in the cauldron of Eastern despotism. Transforming the phrase into ‘Ex Oriente Fumis’ (smoke comes from the East), Khvylovy’s verses served to glorify an industrial commune, a nascent social structure that was destined to overrun the traditional peasant landscape and replace it with a forest of steaming pipes. A century later, his beloved Kharkiv and Donbas are studded with smoking barrels that sow fire across the fertile lands of eastern and southern Ukraine. 

As the most spectacular of the four elements, fire facilitates the transformation of the material world at an unseen pace. Today it is the fire that comes after the cold Enlightenment and the smoking ruins of a proletarian dream that makes an image sharper, renders feelings more vivid, marks its presence on the skin. It has far more immediate consequences than its romantic predecessors. Distance is the key – will it warm you or burn you? Not yet visible over the CarpathianMountains, it comes to a united Europe in the form of gaslight; these burning fossils are dead, though they nevertheless return to life as bombs and specters.  

In the 21st century, perhaps more than ever before, fire has become an immediate tool of politics: from the burning of tires on Maidan Nezalezhnosti to the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell and the burning of the Koran in an Arnhem square to the torching of American flags in Tehran. Fire provides direct access to political action that is otherwise hidden in the technocratic nature of the modern world – one that has devoted so much effort to domesticating and calculating the effects of fire until it became flanked by flames. As we step into darkness at the Pochen Biennial, we will gaze into the reflections of the world cast by the coming fire and engage in an artistic exploration of the current pyropolitics of Europe, the explosion of multiple Easts, phosphorescent geographies, gaslit economies, the necropoesis of war, and the burnout of the Yalta-Potsdam system.