Ici et ailleurs

Video installation Ici et ailleurs, is about the artist’s mother, who is an organ player and musician. The artist calls upon many iconic art historical images of artists’ mothers, including that of Édouard Manet. Karabinovych films his mother playing Francis Poulenc's Concerto for Organ, Timpani and Strings on an invisible organ. She is surrounded by silence, as Karabinovych removes the noise of the video, layering an almost empty soundtrack consisting primarily of wind, moving hands and background noises (“fragile sounds”, as Karabinovych describes them). In this way, the artist partakes in his mother’s loss. If she cannot hear the sound of her music, neither can he – and neither can the viewer.

The artist realised that by creating a space of shared grief, the artwork could even “help her come back to her passion, reactivate something within her.” The artwork has deep repercussions even beyond the personal grief that it unveils. Karabinovych describes the silence as “a metaphor for absence”, relating it to his and his mother’s physical distance from home in Ukraine. He explains, “I am not experiencing the war in a full, and neither is she. So,I can only speak of it in silence. But, this absence is a tough task. We do not have as much distance from it as it seems. We are deeply connected. So my strategy is silence. With silence, you can connect. Dealing with trauma sometimes starts with silence.”