2022
plastic, metal, rust 9 pieces 75x60sm
TESTAMENT: THIS MYSTERY WILL GO WITH ME TO THE GRAVE consists of nine wall-
mounted sculptural fragments, each resembling a fossilized remnant of a skeletal structure.
Cast in plastic and metal and coated with rust, the forms evoke animal spines or
rudimentary organisms arrested mid-evolution. Their surfaces appear eroded, brittle, and
excavated, as if unearthed from a contaminated future rather than preserved from the past.
Despite their paleontological aura, the materials remain unmistakably synthetic—plastic
masquerading as bone, corrosion staged as age.
Arranged together, the fragments function simultaneously as relics and language. Each
piece takes on the shape of a letter; collectively they spell TESTAMENT, transforming debris
into a declaration addressed directly to the viewer. The work stages a collision between
evidence and message, fossil and text, silence and inscription. What reads as a memorial is
also an accusation: a record of war and ecological ruin rendered as illegible remains that
nonetheless insist on being read. These are not bones of extinct creatures, but proofs of a future already decomposing—documents that survive precisely because the truth they
contain was never spoken aloud.
Dedicated to my father
Two months after the start of the full-scale invasion, Mom said that one evening Dad took the keys to someone else’s car and drove off in an unknown direction. It later turned out that the car had been completely shot up and Dad was in Belgorod (a major city in Russia near Ukraine). When I video-called him, he was in a creepy rented apartment, frighteningly thin with a gunshot wound to his side. He said he’d been patched up in a basement where they patch up people like him. When asked what had happened and why he went there in the first place, he replied, “That secret will go to the grave with me.”
Later, Mom said that to get back to Ukraine, he had to go through Moscow to Finland, and at the border, he was thoroughly checked. Fortunately, as she said, he never had any social media except TikTok. When I asked what his TikTok handle was, he said, “That secret will go to the grave with me.” He responded the same way when I first asked him years ago why he set fire to the synagogue.
I hope someday I’ll meet him on TikTok.