Apartment exhibition in Kyiv 
February 24th–25th, 2024

In August 2023, I became a mother. My very first weeks at home with Teo were marked by the sweetness and stickiness of breast milk flowing down my body and making puddles on the bed linen. When the baby feeds from one breast, milk immediately begins to flow from the other.

My birthday is on February 24th. Teo will turn six months old by that date. However, our breastfeeding relationship has remained almost unchanged. We still fall asleep in a puddle of milk, — milk sprinkles and soaks everything around. This year, it will be the second time I have prepared an apartment exhibition on this day, which coincides with the anniversary of the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This time my exhibition will focus on milk.

Over the course of my motherhood, I have experienced breastfeeding as a mutually dependent process, intertwining the lives of mother and child. Beyond the baby’s need for milk in the early months, my body also knows my son’s hunger, — milk begins to seep through the clothes, seeking its infant. The exhibition is based on the sensory experience of motherhood in times of war. Without directly addressing military events, it raises questions about the nature of family, caring in a world of interlinked crises, and our search for a safe environment.

The exhibition’s title — ‘Milk for Teo’ — points simultaneously to the material and symbolic (even the magical) presence of milk in the life of a family with a child. I speak about breasts as a feminine organ that serves others, bodily transformation as a natural process, as well as mythical thinking for imagining the future. I am grateful for motherhood as it has allowed me to regain my ability to think about the future.

In the text accompanying last year’s exhibition — ‘Thickets, Groves, Woods, and Bushes’ — I shared that curating the exhibition was the only possible way for me to embrace the circumstances that had begun to shape our lives. This year, I feel it more than emotionally. I need to document the process of the physiological changes that have happened to my body, and those which my son is rapidly undergoing, nourishing himself with breast milk and immersing himself in the world we created for ourselves (for him).

The exhibition will take place again in the apartment of my childhood. All the works will exist among plants, books, furniture, and our personal belongings. Zoia Kadan, Zhanna Kadyrova, Katya Lesiv, Katerina Lysovenko, Laure Prouvost, and Tamara Turlun are joining my narrative about milk.

Curated by Oleksandra Pogrebnyak