Sculpture by Mikhail Ray

"Trigger Globes" series In collaboration with Nadiya Petrovska Edition 1/12 Concrete, glass, plastic, acrylic, liquid. t began long before the start of the war in 2014 or the full-scale invasion, long before the occupation of Kherson and destruction of the Kakhovska dam. It started even before the dream that Nadia had for the first time when she was a child. In this dream she was standing on the roof of a flooded building she lived in with her parents, looking at the water stretching to the horizon and the boats floating around her neighborhood in Kherson, called “The Island”. I remember how in the first days of the invasion, at the end of February 2022, I also had a similar dream: that the street and the building I lived in were deep under the water. I was floating up, where there is light, where there is a source, that breaks through the surface. I have no idea when it actually started. When people lined in the streets for food, when stores and warehouses began to be looted, I did not think that these reincarnations could not happen to people who had never been to war. That my own feelings, thoughts and actions are not mine at all, I simply could not get them in my lifetime, I had no such experience. It's as if we've been preparing for this all our existence, as if some hidden scripts that had been waiting all the peacetime in the depths of consciousness have finally taken the entire mind under control. What kind of internal dam was broken and whose memories, fears and pain flooded us? What was the "Island" we landed to in search of salvation? Where all this mass of destructive poisoned water was before and what was it doing? We found ourselves trapped in a glass ball and did not know how to get out. Or we finally have seen it?