APOSTAXIS: From memory to resilience
Displacement leaves its mark in different ways; in the objects people carry, the traditions they hold onto, and the stories they choose to tell. This October, four artists from Ukraine and Cyprus will come together through APOSTAXIS, a project of joint residencies, co-creation and exhibition exploring resonances between two territories distant in geography but connected in experience and displacement.
Following an open call this summer, we’re delighted to introduce the four artists who will take part in the residencies running in Ternopil, Ukraine, and Larnaca, Cyprus, this October.
Olena Kayinska
Based in Lviv, Olena Kayinska is an artist, curator, researcher and cultural manager whose practice, what she describes as intellectual primitivism, pairs a distinctive visual language with deep philosophical and psychological inquiry. Since beginning her artistic career in 2012, her research has centred on trauma and post-traumatic recovery, psychosomatic healing, and the layered, contradictory nature of being human: the pull between vulnerability and strength, the rational and the mystical. She has shown work in over 100 exhibitions, festivals, and residencies internationally, and her paintings sit in museum and private collections across more than a dozen countries. Alongside her own practice, she has curated exhibitions and residency and relocation programmes supporting artists at risk.
Kateryna Krokha
Kateryna Krokha works at the intersection of visual art, text, and research, drawing on a background in sociology and literature to explore home, language, and memory as living, shifting things. Working across experimental video, documentary storytelling, and text-based installation, she favours minimal technical means and a strong instinct for making with what’s already at hand. Her documentary work has taken her into Ukraine’s active war zone, including a film shot in Kherson, and her community-facing projects, like the poetry game Mosaic, reflect a broader commitment to art as dialogue and shared meaning-making, especially with young people. For Kat, art is a way of paying attention to what usually goes unseen.
Olena Kulish
Now based in Warsaw, Olena Kulish began her independent practice in late 2022, working across collage, painting, digital graphics, and mixed media to explore identity in its many forms. Migration, displacement, the search for home, feminism, memory, and the connections between times and places run through her work. Since starting out, she has taken part in group exhibitions and residencies across Ukraine, Poland, Germany, and beyond, and presented her first solo project, Regaining, at a residency in Przemyśl, Poland, in 2024.
Elin Yurtdaş
Representing Cyprus, Elin Yurtdaş is an interdisciplinary artist working across textiles, ceramics, sculpture, and installation, drawn to materials and the histories they carry. Her practice combines craft techniques – sewing, embroidery, weaving, ceramics – with reclaimed and everyday materials, tracing how objects hold personal experience, place, and memory. Her earlier work engaged environmental themes, from fast fashion to plastic pollution and the changing marine environment; more recently, it has turned toward Cypriot cultural heritage, identity, and belonging, with textile processes doubling as ways of thinking through these questions.
What’s Next
From 6–28 October 2026, the four artists will take part in two joint residencies: Olena Kayinska and Kateryna Krokha will travel to Ternopil, hosted at CoCA’s NVAIR residency, while Olena Kulish joins Elin Yurtdaş in Larnaca, hosted by D6:EU. Each residency will close with a public presentation for local audiences in Ternopil at the Ternopil Regional Art Museum, and in Larnaca at Obiimy.
The residencies will centre on artistic research into historic and recent displacement, how people have preserved traditions and intangible heritage amid upheaval, and what that knowledge might offer those rebuilding new lives today. The work developed will feed into a digital exhibition in December and a full exhibition at Obiimy, Larnaca, in January 2027, curated by Lucy Nychai.
Follow along as the residencies unfold.
APOSTAXIS is implemented within ZMINA:Resilience, a cooperation between IZOLYATSIA (UA) and Malý Berlín (SK), with support from Trans Europe Halles (SE). Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.