Sing To Me About A Never-Happening Return

To vanish is to disintegrate: into air, into ash, into abstraction. A body becomes a vibration. Dust to dust, not as metaphor, but as sacred certainty. It is from this point that Julien Sitruk and Valeriia Karaman begin, or descend. Their collaborative performance opens like an invocation, heavy with unspoken yearning. The gallery is dim, suffused with violet LEDs that cast a glow reminiscent of forgotten sanctuaries and nocturnal rites. All around them, affixed to walls and scattered across the space, are fragments of photographic material: images they themselves developed, silent witnesses to their ritual and of the pain endured that has come before it. These photographs, blurred and spectral, deepen the atmosphere of haunting. They are not documentation, but memory made visible, visual remnants of what once was and can never fully return. From the fog, a voice begins. It does not enter so much as rupture. Trembling, indistinct, genderless, it sounds like grief learning to speak. Then, guitar. A single strum reverberates through the space like a shiver crawling across skin. Sitruk’s instrument growls in guttural tongues, scraping against silence like bones on wood. Karaman’s voice meets it mid-air, merging into a duet that defies music. Her throat conjures the texture of absence; her body writhes as though remembering something it can no longer hold. Each note pleads. Each scream resounds like the echo of someone who never came back. The longer you watch, the more it feels like you’ve stepped into mourning itself, trying to learn how to wail without words. Karaman’s spectral presence was amplified by the work of body artist and/or Visual Conceptualist Anastasiia Barylko, who painted her face with a pattern of white blotches: lunar, suggestive of a face half-dissolved. Her eyes, however, were kept vivid and defiant, burning through the haze. She was becoming a ghost and oracle all at once.