24 February is a date that became a collective trigger for the entire country. On this day, marking the anniversary of the beginning of the full-scale invasion, TRIGGER — an exhibition by Vladyslav Krasnoshchok — opens as a project that returns the viewer to the first, exposed, and extreme experience of wartime Kharkiv.

Concept

A trigger is a stimulus that provokes a strong emotional or psychological reaction, often uncontrollable and deeply personal. In art, a trigger does more than provoke — it compels an encounter with what is usually suppressed: fear, memory, corporeality, death.

At the heart of the exhibition is an art gesture carried out by the artist during the first month of the war. At that time, Krasnoshchok “opened” an exhibition in his own home: outdoors, on ropes, he hung the painting series Tyrants. Dark, disturbing, almost mystical portraits of historical figures swayed in the cold spring wind, accompanied by the then unfamiliar sound of air-raid sirens. The only physical witness to this exhibition was the artist himself; its viewers were users of social media.

This gesture became a quintessence of Kharkiv’s first month of war: deserted streets, explosions, paralyzing fear — and at the same time a strange, almost forbidden sense of a new kind of freedom. In the gallery space, a live video document of that original act is presented as a way of immersing the viewer in the state of the “first days,” without distance and without protective filters.

At the same time, Krasnoshchok’s painting is itself a trigger. The other works presented in the exhibition address themes that are difficult or uncomfortable to think about or articulate: death, sex, loneliness, dirt, corporeality, and something fundamentally elusive that lies beyond language and morality. This art does not explain — it unsettles.

For this reason, the exhibition is marked 18+. We ask visitors to approach it attentively and responsibly — as an experience that may be emotionally challenging, yet essential for both personal and collective reflection.

Curator: Ulyana Krucha