Permanent Home of Displacement
Ukraine/Finland
2025
“Permanent Home of Displacement” is an interdisciplinary art project bringing together the voices of five Crimean Tatar artists currently living in exile, in a state of permanent mobility and fragmented sense of home. The exhibition explores how the personal experience of losing one’s land, culture, language, and roots can be transformed into a new form of artistic expression. What is “home” for those who were forced to leave theirs behind? How can fragments of a lost identity be reassembled to create a symbolic spa
The exhibition was hosted in an unfinished space at Garage33 Gallery-Shelter. This decision reflects the desire to show the process, not the illusion of a finished result. We ask the question: is stable architecture possible in a situation of constant war? A similar (co)existence was experienced after the return to Crimea: living in houses without facades, with unfinished walls, temporary stairs, and verandas without glass. It was a life in constant repair and incompleteness, striving for stability but without full comfort.
The artists in the project do not recreate Crimea or directly depict the political situation. They work with the consequences of forced displacement and their own vulnerable experiences, transforming them into a resource. Their works focus on collecting and reflecting on the remnants of landscapes, leftover archives, vanishing elements of architecture, and family histories.
As part of the first exhibition, there was a parallel program featuring 6 events, including:
Photo gallery
The choice of location for the exhibition's second iteration - Helsinki International Artist Programme's Gallery Augusta on the island of Suomenlinna is deliberate. Suomenlinna, a sea fortress and UNESCO World Heritage site, has a multi-layered history marked by military conflicts, colonial regimes, occupation, forced displacement of people, and shifting borders. Here, in a place that embodies the memory of defense, exile, and survival, the works of Crimean Tatar artists gain new resonance: the island becomes a symbolic “temporary home” and a meeting place for communities that have experienced loss.
HIAP, as an international residency uniting artists from around the world, provides conditions for intercultural dialogue and deep reflection on the theme of exile. In this context, the exhibition is not only an artistic event but also a shelter of solidarity, where new ways of coexistence and mutual support are born.
The Permanent Home of displacement on Suomenlinna is a space where art transforms the fragments of personal and collective histories into new visions of home, community, and future.
From October 1 to 7, 2025, a week-long mobile residency took place in Helsinki, where the artists had the opportunity to show their work, raise awareness about the Crimean tatar community and art, meet with key art institutions in Finland, network with Finland-based artists, curators, and culture professionals, as well as connect with artists, politicians, and activists of Sámi background — indigenous people who have fought to preserve their culture and identity amid colonial and postcolonial processes for centuries. The exhibition in Helsinki was on view at HIAP Gallery Augusta from October 3 to October 26, 2025. Alongside the exhibition, there was a parallel program consisting of the following events.
Project partners: Ukraine Solidarity Residencies Programme, Crimean Platform Office, Ukrainian-Danish Youth House, National Museum of the History of Ukraine in World War II, PinchukArtCentre Research Platform, National Art Museum of Ukraine.
Media partners: Sensor Media, MiTEC, Marie Claire.
Holy Blue & Yellow
Group exhibition at the Supermarket Independent Art Fair 2022 in Stockholm, Sweden
The genocide, aggression, terrorism, russism, war again Ukraine that were started by russia on February 24, 2022, have changed the world. «Holy Blue & Yellow» exhibition project will be a space-shelter for the art pieces from «conflict» by artists, who are still in Ukraine and the one's that are refugees. These artworks have special mission: they're continuing of a discussion about migration, borders, war, role, and place of woman in it, role and place of artist and art in conflict reality, all attendants geopolitical, sociocultural and gender issues.
Yes, «Holy Blue & Yellow» is a meeting place, a dinner party for artists with different backgrounds, traumas, experiences, working with different media and in different visual aesthetic. But they all are talking about the same things – they all united by a similar attitude to new modernity and the place of art in it. Our artists and their art need a safe place for freedom of speech and without any borders. We invite all to our queer-feminist box as a shelter for contemporary art from «conflict» – «Holy Blue & Yellow».
All proceeds from art pieces sales will be distributed among artists and the rest will be donated for the continuation of the gallery-shelter's working in exile and for the humanitarian response for families from Chernihiv city in northern Ukraine and Mariupol – a huge city in the south of Ukraine, which is totally devastated by bombardment russian murders and where is a humanitarian disaster occurs.
Artists: Svitlana Biedarieva, Julia Bielaeva, Daria Bilak, Dasha Chechushkova, Borys Kashapov, Kinderseele, Olga Krykun, Maria Kulikovska + Eva Kulikovska-Vinnichenko, MKOV Studio [Maria Kulikovska + Oleh Vinnichenko], Daria Sankova, Kateryna Seheda, Marina Svyrydova
Photo documentation of the process of assembling the exposition.
