Platform “Past / Future / Art”: participants of the “Memory Polis” forum

The memory culture platform “Past / Future / Art” has existed since 2019. Its curators, Kateryna Semeniuk and Oksana Dovhopolova, set out to create a space for public discussion and for working through questions that are connected to the past, but in fact remain urgent for the present. The team took part in the “Memory Polis” forum organized by VETERANKA at the KSE Dragon Capital Building on January 23.

Until 2022, the team focused on tragedies that were more distant in time, such as the Chornobyl nuclear disaster. Since 2022, the platform has also been working on memorialization of the full-scale war.

The curators say that some of the most important breakthroughs in working with memory—and in finding language to speak about trauma—happen in the arts. Art has become a key tool for documenting experience since the start of the full-scale invasion.

“Each of us found ourselves face to face with an experience we had never had before. It turned out that in this difficult situation, art can be a source of support. Anyone can understand art when it is a meeting with their own experience. Art can offer an experience of solidarity and a sense of connection,” Oksana Dovhopolova said in an interview with LB.ua.

Memory research is an academic field, and not everyone is familiar with its professional terms. That is why, starting in 2020, the platform began creating a glossary of memorialization terms—a basic dictionary of concepts used in work with the past. The team involves specialists from different areas in writing these definitions, including experts in Memory Studies, history, philosophy, international law, and the arts. The glossary can be useful for professionals across fields—from translators to international curators—and it is already actively used in universities. In parallel, the team is developing an English-language version.

Together with the educational resource Cultosvita, the platform also released a video course titled “How Do We Work with the Memory of War?” It explores current remembrance practices that have emerged in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion. The course includes six short lectures on artistic practices, social rituals, and spaces where memory lives today.

“Today in Ukraine we see many new memorials. Sometimes they are frightening and outdated; sometimes they are inspiring. In this course, we focus only on those remembrance practices that inspire,” says course lecturer and platform co-founder Oksana Dovhopolova.

Another initiative implemented together with the NGO “Museum of Contemporary Art” was the Laboratory of Memorialization Practices. Its goal was to search for a language of memory for the Russo-Ukrainian war and to broaden approaches to creating memorial projects. The project ran from March to July 2024.

In addition to learning about important global memorialization practices, participants also developed ideas for memorial objects for several war memory sites in Ukraine. One example is Vitalii Kokhan’s artistic intervention “In memoriam of all of us,” which appeared in Kharkiv in the summer of 2025.

On the façade of a school, the team placed images and messages such as: “This wall has witnessed the horrors of war since 24 February 2022,” “Mordor — 35 km,” “F-16,” “And someone didn’t leave,” as well as everyday wartime symbols: a car, a cat, the trident, a diode, a bowl of fruit, a pistol—images taken from ordinary life in a country at war.

In this way, the artist documented the experience of living in Ukraine during wartime, his own thoughts, and the memories of Kharkiv residents. The inscriptions and images were created by removing square tiles from the damaged façade of the building.

Curator Kateryna Semeniuk says the idea emerged during the Laboratory’s field expeditions to Pivnichna Saltivka in 2024.

“Back then, together with artists and architects, our goal was to find a memorial language for Kharkiv in response to residents’ needs. People in Saltivka did not want to preserve destruction or use sacrificial messages. For them, what mattered most was rebuilding the neighborhood and preserving life in the city,” she says.

From 11 March to 23 July 2023, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in Germany hosted the curatorial exhibition “From 1914 till Ukraine,” curated by Kateryna Semeniuk and Oksana Dovhopolova. The exhibition brought together works by Otto Dix from the First and Second World Wars and works by Ukrainian artists created after 2014. The project explored a century of empires collapsing: did the last empire truly disappear, or is it attempting to return through the invasion of Ukraine?

After the exhibition closed, some works entered the museum’s collection, including the video “Recording in Progress” and the photograph “Crater in the Destroyed Village of Moshchun” by Katia Buchatska (pictured), as well as the installation “Steppe of Mickey Mice. Archives” by Andrii Rachynskyi and Daniil Revkovskyi, and the painting “False Sky” by Andrii Sahaidakovskyi.

On 14 March 2024, Ukraine’s national pavilion opened at the first Malta Biennale. Titled “From South to North,” it featured a project by artist Alevtina Kakhidze, which addresses one of the Biennale’s key themes—decolonization—against the backdrop of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The platform also actively develops its Instagram micro-media @war_memory_ua. There, it publishes texts about global experience in working with traumatic memory, explains complex issues related to memory culture, documenting crimes, and re-traumatization, and shares examples of memorialization practices currently emerging in Ukraine.