Where the Light Comes In: Days of Izyum

What remains of everyday life when its predictability is disrupted? And how can ordinary actions offer a sense of stability when everything around us becomes uncertain?

In Where the Light Comes In, Days of Izyum, multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Kiki Ho explores the barely visible structures that hold our daily lives together. Repetition, expectation, care, memory and preservation: actions that, because of their familiarity, often escape our attention, but take on a different meaning once that familiarity disappears.

The exhibition originates from an experimental, essayistic documentary Ho made in eastern Ukraine while working with Insulate Ukraine, an NGO that installs emergency windows in areas affected by war. Rather than focusing on the war itself, the film turns its attention to the everyday life that stubbornly continues alongside it: a kettle boiling, vegetables being chopped, a cat purring, a window being repaired. Ordinary actions become evidence of continuity.

In the Project Space at Loods6, this exploration continues spatially. Film, sound, poetry, music, objects and architecture bring the everyday to the foreground. Familiar actions are isolated, magnified and repeated, allowing them to become visible and tangible once again. Visitors move through a series of spaces in which patterns emerge and are disrupted, voices and memories surface, and the familiar gradually becomes strange.

With contributions by composer Anton Baibabov and writer and poet Kateryna Babkina, Where the Light Comes In, Days of Izyum ultimately explores a universal question: what are the small, often invisible actions through which we hold a life together, and what do we discover about their value when they are at risk of disappearing?