The exhibition Way Here \ We Are Home. Kharkiv brings together two DIFFERENT voices: two artists, two aesthetics, two ways of seeing. It is a meeting of two visual diaries that, since the beginning of the full-scale war, have been quietly appearing in social media feeds. Two narratives that form a dialogue — like beads strung on a single thread, each retaining its own shape, color, and weight.

Daria Khrisanfova

Daria Khrisanfova works with painting, murals, and spatial interventions. Her practice grows out of attentiveness to material, space, and rhythm. She works with paint and texture, sometimes incorporating text and installation. Gesture, color, and presence are central to her work — not narrative. Her art holds a pause and creates a state: calm yet charged, where the figurative and the abstract intertwine.

Oleksii Borysov

Borysov’s style is expressive abstraction focused on processes and states of being. His works resemble improvised performances in which symbols, movement, and light take center stage. The absence of a predetermined script gives the image freedom: forms emerge from the movement of the hand or the texture of the surface. The artist does not constrain the visual flow with idealized forms or materials. Canvas, paper, found objects — anything can become a space for recording a moment, an inner drift, a sense of being here and now. This unpolished sincerity allows Borysov to move freely between non-figurative art and applied graphics, including illustration for books and magazines.

Concept

Daria Khrisanfova’s series We Are Home. Kharkiv emerged from the experience of staying. After a direct shell strike destroyed her home, the artist did not leave the city and did not adopt a catastrophic lens. Her works do not document destruction; they insist on presence. Here, home is not walls but a state of being. Kharkiv is not a location but a form of inner resilience. The repeated phrase “We are home” becomes not a statement but an act — a gesture of rooting oneself in a space that is constantly being rendered uninhabitable.

Oleksii Borysov’s series Way Here is a journey. From the first days of the full-scale invasion, Borysov used his own car to evacuate people from Kharkiv and later delivered medical supplies to the military. Almost daily, he publishes works on his Facebook page as artistic responses to these journeys. The series exists as a visual diary of movement — physical, mental, existential. There is no final destination here, only the process of approaching. Toward oneself, toward light, toward the sea, toward memory, toward the state of “here.” These works speak of transition, of the fragile boundary between presence and absence, of a path that continues even when movement seems to have stopped.

The two series differ in tone, rhythm, and visual language, yet in the exhibition they intertwine, emphasizing a sense of the sacred. Khrisanfova works with stillness and rootedness on canvas. Borysov works with motion and inner drift on scraps of paper and everyday objects. One says, “I am here.” The other says, “I am moving toward here.” And at their point of intersection, they speak of the same thing: human presence within the space of war. Of Home. Of the Way. Of Kharkiv.

Curator: Ulyana Krucha