Certain Future Evidence
Exhibition by Open Group — Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga

Repeat after Me II is a two channel video installation that was presented in the Polish Pavilion at the International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia in 2024. It features refugees and internally displaced persons who recount their experiences of war through remembered weapon sounds — they imitate these sounds and invite the audience to do the same. Visitors are encouraged to join in this re-enactment within a space staged as a futuristic military karaoke bar. Here, the soundtrack is not composed of familiar hits, but of gunfire, cannonades, howls, and explosions, while the lyrics are descriptions of deadly weapons. This is the soundscape of war, recreated by its witnesses. By repeating after them, one begins to learn the language of their experience.

The exhibition presents films from different stages of the war, underscoring its grim continuity. In Repeat after Me (2022), the voices belong to internally displaced persons who fled from eastern to western Ukraine. In the 2024 video, these testimonies shift to a transnational context. The protagonists — still from Ukraine — now reside in various cities across Europe and beyond: Wrocław, Berlin, Vienna, Vilnius, Tullamore, and New York, among others. This second film expands the geography of displacement and portrays the characters at a moment when the war in Ukraine has lasted for over two years and become embedded in our everyday reality. Their stories are intended to serve as a universal message — a collective portrait of refugees from around the world, each time represented through a shared community of sound. Today, the Ukrainian voices could just as easily belong to Palestinians, Yemenis, Libyans, Syrians, or Haitians. The entire world is a landscape of displacement and escape; no refuge can be considered permanent or secure.       

The protagonists of the project attempt to articulate an experience that has left them with the unerring ability to identify the sound of various weapons. This skill reveals a universal aspect of life in war zones: when survival is at stake, the senses sharpen — keen vision and acute hearing become essential.

This work may be understood as both a warning and a manual of specialised knowledge, which survivors of war pass on to their audiences — their potential successors. The weapon sounds they reproduce, reverberating against the backdrop of bustling streets and quiet courtyards in countries currently at peace, are deeply unsettling. No one can assure that the cities featured in the 2024 video will remain untouched by war. Repeat after Me II is a manifesto against all armed conflicts, expressed in a peaceful form.

Waiting Room installation gives form to what remains unseen: the weight of memory and the silence of trauma. The starting point is a reconstruction of the interior of the waiting room of the now-destroyed train station in Mariupol, designed in the characteristic Socialist realism style. The monumental mosaic inside the waiting room depicted the work of steelworkers, the archetypal heroes of the Soviet myth of progress and modernization. Today this image is a memory, and the station itself a ruin. Displayed next to the mock-up are texts taken from announcements about missing persons that have been published on one of Telegram’s Ukrainian channels since the beginning of the war. These short entries contain dry, factual information. They form a poignant collection of contemporary disappearances, a record of waiting with no guarantee of return, a database of absences. These texts, though devoid of names and emotional additions, carry a brooding silence that resonates with the emptiness of the reconstructed space of the station’s waiting room.

The artists use the symbolism of the train station, a place that seems neutral, but is in fact marked by emotional intensity. The railway station in Mariupol, now in ruins, was once a vehicle for utopian visions of the future with a giant mosaic dedicated to labor, industry, and community. All that remains of it today is a memory and an unfulfilled promise to last. Displayed alongside the texts, they become the fabric of collective experience, a register of suffering and helplessness. Waiting is framed here as an existential state in which the individual is suspended between memory and hope.

Waiting Room is not only an installation about the war, it is also a question about ways to commemorate it, about how to talk about the tragedy today without falling into the rhetoric of empty symbols. It is an intimate and diffuse memorial, based not on a heroic narrative, but on everyday silent persistence. At the center is not an event, but an experience: a prolonged ‘not yet’, a time of waiting without end, which cannot be inscribed in a linear axis of history.

In philosophy, waiting is sometimes defined as a form of inaction, a state of limbo in which the individual is deprived of causality. But in the context of war, waiting takes on a different meaning. It becomes a form of resistance, of survival, of silent protest in the face of chaos and violence. In the installation by the Open Group, this waiting is present in both the material and narrative layers. In this sense, Waiting Room acts as a kind of anti-installation of memory, instead of stabilizing the historical message, it breaks out of its form. Instead of speaking, it allows those whose voices are too often silent in the shadows of grand narratives to speak. This is art that does not seek catharsis, but enters into a state of continuous duration. Its politicity is not about literalism or agitation, but about being close at hand with compassion, a tenderness toward the fate of the individual that can so easily go unnoticed.

The project is an attempt to create another ‘open situation’ — an activity in which the process and experience of the participants become equal elements in the work. At the center of the project is a paradoxical procedure: evaluating and selecting others’ memories, carried out according to clearly defined rules, in an atmosphere of overt bureaucracy. This deliberate juxtaposition confronts that which is unstable, personal and ephemeral memory with the cool logic of formal structures, such as an archive, an institution or an office.

Memories are treated like capital: a material trace of an individual’s presence in time and history. According to materialist theories of history, as long as we are mortal, man’s ultimate capital remains time, and memories go hand in hand with it as the ‘profit’. This project therefore proposes to look at memory not only as an emotional resource, but as a commodity subject to social exchange, negotiation and sometimes rejection.

In the small, three-level structure of the office, individuals share their memories, which are then subject to selection by other participants — they are accepted into the ‘history’ of the project (its archive and exhibition space) or rejected as irrelevant, trivial, unnecessary. There is internal tension here: who decides the value of someone else’s experience and on what basis? Can something personal really be unnecessary? How can we distinguish memory from construction, or memory from imagination?

This project puts participants in a situation of open confrontation: between subjective experience and the objectifying evaluation of others. It leads to reflection on who has the right to create history and under what conditions, as well as the value of those micro-histories that do not fit into the official circulation of collective memory.