On March 6th, the exhibition War is Personal by Julia Kochetova opened at Foam Amsterdam. The exhibition does not seek to be seen in the ordinary museum sense – it asks to be entered, almost with caution as one enters a church. Julia Kochetova (1993), a Kyiv-based photographer and documentary filmmaker, has insisted on turning war away from abstraction: from statistics, maps, and the anesthetic language of headlines. The exhibition’s framing is precise in this regard: war has names, faces, bodies, and homes. It is not a background but it is a wound inside the frame.
What stays with me most from the opening is not only Kochetova’s urgency, but her moral clarity. “Love is action,” she said. “Make action.” And also: “I feel responsible for those lost. I should do more and I should be louder, because I’m the voice of those lost.” Photography, for Kochetova, is not a practice of distance but a reaction, an obligation, a form of witness-bearing that refuses any neutrality.
The exhibition design deepens this conviction beautifully. Linen draperies printed with her poetry function as walls: soft, permeable, intimate. Against the dark blue of the gallery walls, one feels slightly smaller, quieter, more vulnerable. That color decision is subtle but powerful: it lowers the voice of the room so that the photographs can speak, almost being close to the ritual of confession. It makes you approach them personally, and sometimes almost apologetically.
And that is right because these images should not be easy to consume. Kochetova mentioned she wants photography in wartime to be something one can feel, touch, experience – it is not a still image, but an emotional transfer. She wants to recreate memories, not merely make photographs. In this sense, War is Personal is strongest when it is inconvenient: when it blocks aesthetic comfort, when it refuses the viewer the privilege of distance, when it reminds us that to think war is far away is already a political failure.
As it was a beautiful sunny day in Amsterdam, one line from the opening in particular returns to me: “The sun is deceptive – the darker times are coming, and war will come closer.” In Amsterdam, where safety can so easily appear as permanence, this sentence landed with particular force. That is the unbearable knowledge Kochetova carries into the museum: that war sharpens life even as it destroys it. This is not an exhibition about images of war – it is an exhibition that refuses to let those lives lost become unnamed and a sense of safety be taken for granted.
War is Personal by Julia Kochetova is on view until May 25 at Foam Amsterdam, Keizersgracht 609 1017 DS Amsterdam. The entrance costs 16,00€, and free admissions for anyone with a Museumkaart or ICOM card.
VATAHA Recommends features events and exhibitions unaffiliated with VATAHA but aligned with our mission to promote Ukrainian arts and culture in the Netherlands.
This recommendation was suggested by Oksana Savchuk. Check out all VATAHA Recommends here.