Kateryna Kostelna
Where Memories Live:
An Exhibition That Opens the Quiet Rooms of Childhood
There are memories that do not arrive as images, but as sensations: the weight of a pillow, the warmth of sweetened water, the sound of a game played with a blade of grass. Where Memories Live, currently on view at THIS Gallery, moves within this fragile territory - where recollection is partial, tender, and always on the verge of disappearance.
The exhibition brings together new works by Ukrainian immigrant artists Jennifer Anoruie and Kateryna Kostelna. Across nine works - primarily acrylic paintings on canvas, alongside three installations - the artists construct an intimate landscape of memory, displacement, and the fragile act of rebuilding a sense of home.
The text was written by Anna Matviichuk
At the centre of the exhibition stands a pillow barricade installation, a quiet yet powerful unifying gesture between the two practices. Soft, domestic, almost playful at first glance, the piece evokes the safety of a grandmother’s house, childhood forts, and the comfort of familiar interiors. Yet the reference quickly shifts. The barricade also recalls the sandbag structures seen across Ukraine during wartime. Comfort and danger coexist in the same form, reflecting a reality where childhood innocence and the ongoing violence of war cannot be separated.
The paintings throughout the space linger on small rituals and fleeting gestures. In Jennifer Anoruie’s Rooster or Hen, the artist draws from a traditional Ukrainian children’s game played with a blade of grass. One end represents a rooster, the other a hen; a pull determines the winner. The simplicity of the game becomes a metaphor for chance, fragility, and the quiet tension embedded even in playful moments. Rendered in muted, earthy tones, Anoruie’s work feels like memory recalled in fragments - hands, hair, and gestures appearing as if half-remembered.
Kateryna Kostelna’s Cherry Tea offers a different kind of intimacy. The painting recalls a childhood moment when her grandmother would make tea from fresh cherries - hot water, sugar, and fruit. A humble, improvised drink becomes an emotional anchor, holding warmth, care, and survival within it. Kostelna’s broader practice often centres on domestic objects and kitchen rituals, where furniture, food, and everyday tools become symbols of control, comfort, and inherited anxiety. Her imagery - ornate carpets, lavish tables, religious icons - balances familial warmth with the lingering question: could this all be taken away again?
After moving through the exhibition, visitors were invited to anonymously write down their own favourite childhood memories. The gesture quietly extended the exhibition beyond the artworks, transforming the gallery into a shared archive of remembrance - proof that memory, while deeply personal, is also collective.
For both artists, leaving Ukraine was not a choice but an urgent necessity. Immigration unravels the familiar - language, routine, and place dissolve into uncertainty. In that instability, memory becomes a method of survival. What disappears externally is reconstructed internally, forming what the exhibition describes as an “inner home”: a space shaped not by geography, but by lived experience, cultural inheritance, and small rituals that tether us to ourselves.
