1080/now – Once upon a time, houses were big

Kjetil Røed, art critic and editor-in-chief of Billedkunst (7.2.2025)

What is the relationship between war and art? These are important questions, especially in an unstable and chaotic world like ours, because the answer says something about who we are as people and what kind of value art ultimately has.

Because we live in a different time now, as both Putin and the crazy president of the United States have told us. Despots and liars have a lot of room to speak , they dominate the scene, and the ghosts of fascism and imperialism have begun to haunt us – again. Lies and power, and great differences between the powerless and those at the top, the oligarchs, are gaining ground – again.

And it happened so quickly. Who would have thought it?

But we live in a different world now.

Therefore, we must get to the essence of things more quickly, of what we hold dear, with greater clarity, greater conviction.

Greater courage.

Volodymyr Filippov does this in his exhibition 1080/now – Once upon a time, houses were as big as the ones we stand in now.

Filippov is Ukrainian himself and has experienced the effects of war on his body.

He both documents the terrible and continues to work with what has happened, but not as pure depictions of events or things, but as a blueprint for how he – who himself has been part of it – and others – who stand worried on the sidelines – should be able to work through the difficult situation.

In a series of paintings he has called I Remember When Houses Were Big, we see the remains of bombed-out buildings, but also fragments of safe days before the war, around the dinner table, perhaps, or out on a peaceful park bench. By painting these remains of buildings, but also the sorrow for what was, he holds fast to this difficult gray area created by war and violence, where we walk around in a ghostly world of remnants of the past, while at the same time trying to find new footing. He shows the connections between the remains of the past, the memories of what has been destroyed, and the future, by imagining today's fragments of war – gloves and other equipment from field hospitals, for example – as part of what future archaeologists will excavate from our time.

What do they want to see in Filippov's paintings? Will they see vulnerable people who fought for their lives? I hope so.

War fragments reality, makes what was safe unsafe, I think when I see the many sculptures in this exhibition that consist of homeless pieces of trees, with titles taken from the Hebrew alphabet. These tree fragments were once part of an actual tree that stood somewhere, had a history and belonged to a landscape. Now they stand here, without roots, asking us to find new soil and grow in it for them , as all refugees reach out their hands and ask us for hospitality and belonging.

“Anyone who is rootless himself will tear up the roots of others,” wrote the French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil at the end of World War II.

And if there is one thing that war does, it is precisely this – it uproots people. When I see pictures of houses and cities that have been bombed in Ukraine on the news or pictures in the newspapers, I often think of all the lives that unfolded in these places, all the destinies, all the joy, but also everyday events, all the things that make up a life. Like sitting in the park and reading a book, or watching your children play in the sandbox nearby – for example.

Or having breakfast with the family on a Saturday morning and watching the birds outside the window chirping.

There are so many lives that have been destroyed, there are so many lives that have been lost.

In one of his main works – which we see around us now – he has mapped 1080 of the days the occupation has lasted, as everyday impressions, existential traces of the passing of time in the new era we now live in. Every day he makes a new print – every day the war has lasted.

Every day in this crazy war, schools and hospitals, homes and transformer kiosks have been bombed to shreds. He focuses on these places, this destruction. Volodomyr has also made a list of which structures are being destroyed, which he takes as a starting point – which we can also see in this exhibition, in order to see the reality behind the prints.

When we read the list, we can see that on 16.2.2022 a theater in Mariupol is destroyed. On 10.10 of the same year a playground and a pedestrian bridge are attacked. On 14.4 a five-story apartment building is attacked. On 9.8.2024 we can see that he has concentrated on a shopping mall that was destroyed in Kostjantynivka.

But Filippov saves the remains, showing what is left for us to see, and for the future to see what happened.

Small areas from a wall, a marbled surface in a theater backdrop, some unevenness in the plaster of a home, what remains of a play stand. By focusing on the detail in a daily mapping of the chronology of the war, he speaks a different language than the language of violence. He sees the remains that remain from the perspective of preservation. By taking care of the remains of what has been destroyed, he emphasizes preservation, consideration, and care.

Caring shows both a willingness to speak the truth, to show what has happened and is still happening, but caring for what is left also speaks the language of survival. And for everything and everyone who survives, life goes on. By caring for what is left, we also care for each other.

In care, a past is remembered, but a future is also created.

In other words, Filippov's art moves into the borderland between disappearance and return. Or between despair and hope.

Through the artwork Filippov says that we can explore the breadth of what is possible, even if we live in ruins, even if we are oppressed, and even if strong men stand and threaten everything we hold dear.

Although not everyone experiences war, we humans share a fundamental vulnerability. We can be injured and killed by bullets and gunpowder, but a sense of belonging in the world and having a history that is connected to our homes is something we share. Filippov, from different perspectives, revolves around these common human aspects of existence starting from Ukraine, but we recognize ourselves, because we also need roots, home, belonging and memories that create coherence and historical depth in our lives.

Filippov's art is fundamentally human, because it reflects homes that are gone and the desire to find a new home. They reflect the work of processing the cruel, but also the care for what we remember as important and beautiful, after all. Filippov's art reflects, in this way, the body's solidary and warming imprint. It is an expression of grief, but also compassion, and in this way it invites us into an empathetic space as well. The imprint of art reflects a hand touching a dusty facade, or perhaps it is a hand resting on a shoulder, a friend's or a lover's or a mother's shoulder, to confirm that we still exist.

This is how we can also describe this exhibition as a kind of oasis in the chaos of war, as art itself can be said to be. It tells us that art is something we need in troubled times. For it processes the bad, maps homelessness with new roots in sight. Filippov also shows this in another work, where drafts of the attempts to learn Norwegian are mixed with memories of the war back home in Ukraine.

And he invites us along because the artworks are there, are here, and we can experience it with him.

That the viewer is part of the image, and thus also of the art experience, is clearly expressed in the installation Witness/Resonance Point , where a camera captures the faces of the audience and displays them on a screen above some twigs that can be considered remnants of destruction or a nest for a bird or other animal. The visually complex situation gathers within itself both care and destruction, but it makes us part of this ambivalent situation. In this way, it points out that we are never neutral viewers, but responsible for what we see.

As the Danish philosopher Knud Løgstrup once said: ""The individual never deals with another human being without holding something of their life in his hand."

What is the relationship between war and art?

The war continues, for now, but we can still think, we can still love, we can still find meaning in this cruel, imperfect, strange, but also beautiful thing we call human life. And as long as we know this, as long as we take care of each other, we will find our way home again.

To the places we come from, to childhood, to aging, to happiness and joy. Life.

As long as we can preserve what we hold dear, it will be there, as it is here, in this exhibition.

Filippov's art as it exists .

 

– Kjetil Røed