Katya Lesiv: I am going home to eat mulberries from the tree

"Each winter, I think: it’s impossible that the trees will bear leaves, flowers, fruit. Fruit is fantasy, utopia, impossibility. For half of the year, bare sticks stand in the cold. You cannot surprise me; I know spring will come. Yet still, how unexpected that it arrives. Where is the place of memory that survives winter, that laughs at death? I am the place ofmemory — of safety, of sun, of pleasure. I am intention’s moving object. The intention to return to such a place, again and again."

Katya Lesiv’s exhibition is rooted in sensory memory, myth, and the maternal body. The body becomes a vessel of intention — guided by it, to reach back to the pleasure of the childhood ritual of eating mulberries straight from the tree. In a time marked by instability and fragility, the work unfolds as a quiet yet resilient gesture of presence. The exhibition gathers around the triadmilky / bloody / muddy— echoing the taste and stain of mulberries while tracing a layered language of fertility, motherhood, loss, and the cycle of life.

Bringing together performative photography, text, and sculptural objects, the exhibition moves between instruction, spell, and poem. Self-portraits capture moments of eating berries, belly massage on self and child. The silver gelatin prints appear as objects, referencing the body within the image and gaining a bodily presence themselves. Site-specific installations, accompanied by wood-carved and copper elements, stand as quiet monuments to presence and intention.

The exhibition is supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike), Goethe-Institut Finnland, and the Ukraine Solidarity Residencies Programme.

The Ukraine Solidarity Residency Programme Exhibition Series is curated by Dana Neilson.