​Lesia Vasylchenko

This installation Night Without Shadows and Light Without Rippling of Waves combines two video works: Tachyoness and Night. Thus, ​Lesia Vasylchenko compares the scales of historical temporalities, and the viewers, through their presence and observation, add a human temporal dimension, which connects the past and the future into a single moment.

The work Night recreates a century of Ukrainian night, combining video recordings of the night sky from 1918 to 2025. In this way, Vasylchenko transforms linearity into simultaneity: the video seemingly embodies one long night, with the entire century taking place at the same time, in a continuous flow. It depicts the night’s own eternal temporality, which is not reduced exclusively to the historical perspective and human existence. At the same time, it becomes a witness to many events in both the past and present. In particular, by using materials documenting blackouts and shelling, the work captures how the war turns night into a time of terror and fear. It comments on the generational nature of trauma, and its continuity through a century of history.

Night is a time for alternative stories. In contrast, daylight is associated with the discourse of the Enlightenment, which emphasizes rationality and evidence. Referring to the notion of ‘hauntology’ by Jacques Derrida, the artist emphasizes that the night erases established knowledge systems and conceals within itself all that is unwritten and undocumented, the hidden voices of those who have witnessed history but have not yet been heard and are waiting for the right moment. The night reveals a past that never fully disappears and constantly returns as a ghost of history, which affects the present and the future.

The title of the other video, Tachyoness, comes from the word ‘tachyon’, which means a hypothetical particle that travels faster than the speed of light. The work shows sunrises that occurred from 1990 to 2022, transforming 30 years of history into a single event. The video was created in collaboration with artificial intelligence, which studied hundreds of photographs collected by the artist from various sources and combined them into its own, machine-generated memory of dawn. The video references future prediction technologies, emphasizing the impact of artificial intelligence on the construction of memory. Tachyoness is 8 minutes long, which corresponds to the time it takes for sunlight to reach the Earth and the human eye.