The exhibition focuses on the passage of time during crises such as war and climate change. The acute time of political and economic development runs concurrently with the seasonal time of human waiting for the (un)imaginable end of conflicts. The desire to slow down the advancing drought and warming and the cyclical time of trees and the gardener's year. The perception of human and more-than-human time. The exhibition is created specifically for the gallery space at the time of ripening and harvest.

What can a person do when in his and her country, there is war? This sentence divides people into those from war zones and those from peace zones. It's a strange condition, and empathy is sympathetic, but not enough. Nothing is somehow enough. The very constants of place, time and agency are collapsing and being challenged out of fatigue, depression and anger.

Work? To help? To sympathize? War? Document? Hope? For how long. Some time is not infinite and needs to end!

Polina Davydenko's exhibition After Time reflects, above all, an enchanted time. How much longer? And then you will stop asking. Polina is a documentary photographer, but how many more pictures need to be taken for something to happen?

I guess you have to do everything at once. And that's what's happening in Polina's case. Except for the naked struggle. In August, as a war reporter, she was documenting life near the war zones, collecting not only images but also stories, interviewing the men and women intellectuals who are fighting at the front and trying to give away some hope. At the same time, she was looking for ways to express holistically the state of being at war, the relationship to the territory, the culture that is threatened and the times that will never be again. She was also saying goodbye to a place about to be swallowed up by the front. There will be newsletters about this that Polina will send you during the exhibition.

Polina has been searching for beings that are able to communicate this strange time - as she and everyone in the war says, "the feeling that time stopped after the invasion started." She wandered into one of the oldest forms of art on Ukrainian territory, which is the work of a nomadic culture that existed here far before state formations, far before the modern political geography of the world. So sometimes "after time", after time, can also be "before time", before the existence of our era. So-called babas, stone statues not only from the Ukrainian steppes, are often found precisely in war and occupation zones. Historians and historians and activists are trying to evacuate and save some of them.

The designation "baby" leads to the interpretation of the statues as female deities similar to Venus. In Ukrainian, baba is like our baba, grandmother. But the word "baba" ("bovvan") comes from the Turkish word "balbal", which means "ancestor" or "grandfather". The term "stone baba" thus refers to the monumental stone sculptures depicting male and female figures associated with the nomadic mound-building cultures of the steppe, which built so-called kurgans - tall funerary structures erected over ancestral graves. The statues personified their deceased ancestors and helped them pass on to the next world. The first appearance of statues on the territory of Ukraine dates back to the early Copper Age, Neolithic period, 4000-3000 BC. Their significance was already noticed in a slightly different context by the exhibition Ancient forms: a modern point of view, which presented one hundred of these sculptures from the areas around Dnipro, Kherson, Zaporozhye and other locations as part of the First Kyiv International Biennial of Contemporary Art ARSENALE 2012.

In Polina Davydenko's new film, stone babes are the non-human witnesses of different times that merge into timelessness. Time ceases to exist when we stop measuring it. The statues, which have not been transported to museums and have survived the mistreatment of the people of the past two centuries, have stood in the same places for unimaginably long periods of time, giving them a human idea of their wisdom. We want to ask them if they can see into the future, but instead we just stare at the film, at the changing seasons, the moments of calm that alternate with catastrophes and natural disasters, and the babes that continue to stand there untouched. Perhaps they are an image of locked emotions that is comforting. Perhaps Polina has chosen them as ferrymen and ferrywomen from war to calmer times. The film flows, the main characters do not change, meditation and cyclical time, slow transformations, there is no beginning or end.

The vegetative time also promises moments of forgetfulness. The certainty of the four seasons is soothing. Displace the climate crisis and we have a scorching summer full of apricots. Dobropillya in the Donetsk region, where Polina comes from, which is full of coal, is awash in an orange mass of sweet fruit. But of course we can't just replay images of childhood or life in peace, as tempting as that is. While the apricots are so skillfully made that they are visually bite-sized, their ceramic nature deliberately prevents this. Each one is an original! Hours of work and forbidden reminiscing. But someone has to dream! How deep? The fossil past of the area is somewhat surreptitiously revealed in the exhibition by the plastic reliefs, the product packaging of what the place represents - grain, coal and drones.

The fact that the artist chooses metaphorical language for the difficult themes of war is not an evasion of political responsibility. She is aware that it is not only Ukraine where the war is taking place, that we must sympathise with others who are going through the same evil, despite all the personal suffering. But he also chooses poetic language because the media image of war distorts, reduces and manipulates life. Our bodies themselves resist accepting more and more experienced images. But in the safer zone of the artist's installation, we can re-imagine what it is like to be at war, or what it will be like after this war is finally over. And maybe we will realize that now is the time, if there is any time left, for our help, which can take a million forms. This timeless installation doesn't even have to be connected to the war in Ukraine at all, its mood and register of emotions can take someone to very different places and different stories, and it would be nice to hear and connect them. If you want, you can leave them in the gallery or send them to Polina.

Polina Davydenko is an interdisciplinary artist. She lives and works in Brno, where she works, among other things, at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Technology, from which she herself graduated. She often stays in Ukraine for work and private life. Her work has multiple locations, one of them being photographs related to her interest in documentary and artistic research or installations linking individual image or object fragments of her political, ecological, social and more-than-human commentaries. In her current work, also due to her Ukrainian roots, she explores themes of war as its everyday reality and connects them to older themes of home, migration, acceptance, individuality and gardening. She shows political phenomena through personal narratives and poetic language. She has exhibited at Fotograf Gallery, Moravian Gallery and TIC Gallery. She is a member of Futures Photography.