Two Weeks Left: We Carried the Soil with Us Closes 10 May
There’s a 1979 nuclear explosion buried inside this exhibition. It wasn’t widely reported at the time — a so-called “peaceful” detonation in the east of the Ukrainian SSR, intended to improve coal extraction. Katia Motylova-Babinska, born in Luhansk, photographed steppe plants and then let irradiation enter her film directly, so the same destructive logic that marked the landscape marks the photograph.
All photo credits: Joosje Bosch
That tension between what gets destroyed and what persists runs through all five works in We Carried the Soil with Us, on view at TROEF Contemporary Art Space in Leiden until 10 May. VATAHA’s very own Dasha Lohvynova brings together four Ukrainian female artists to explore soil as a medium, as a living archive that absorbs violence, holds seeds, and keeps returning in unexpected forms.
Stefaniia Bodnia, who grew up near mining and heavy industry in Eastern Ukraine, traces a chain of extraction through her works from coal to steel to neon gas, the world’s supply of which Ukraine supplied a significant share of until 2022, when facilities, including those in Mariupol, were shut down. She builds an archive of corrosion with ash, charcoal, and metal.
Karolina Uskakovych’s film begins with a package of tomato seeds, sent by her grandmother Zoya in winter 2021. Then russia’s full-scale invasion arrives. They continue anyway, tending their gardens online, watching leaves, sharing weather. The film sits alongside a small wooden house with tomato plants growing within it. The work frames soil as a site of contact — where bodies, labor, and risk meet — and as an archive of gestures that carry memory across displacement.
Anna Khvyl’s three-channel audio piece works with turning points: the beginning of war, its end, and captivity. Alongside Ukrainian voices reflecting on the russian full-scale invasion in 2022, the work carries testimonies from Dutch witnesses to the end of World War II. Sound functions as a physical archive, a medium that can hold traces of place, distance, and memory without being fixed images.
The exhibition also includes a living archive where visitors can sit, read, and listen to testimonies, and leave their own trace. No art background required! Entry is free.
There are two weeks left to see, experience, and participate in We Carried the Soil with Us. The closing is 10 May.
TROEF Contemporary Art Space, Leiden. Free entry, open until 10 May 2026.