Nastia Svarevska interviews Serafima Bresler: Russian artist on the war and making art with Ukrainian refugees
Installation view of Everything Not Saved Will be Lost at Klub der Künste, Hamburg, 2022.
Nastia Svarevska: Serafima, as a Russian artist living abroad, did your practice change after Russia invaded Ukraine?
Serafima Bresler: Before the war, my practice explored the consequences of the Chernobyl accident. I studied the involvement of my family and the reaction of the Soviet state to the disaster in 1986. I investigated how propaganda, silence and lies had compounded the liquidation of the consequences. After moving to Germany, I decided to work with more global things. I began looking into the problem of nuclear power and nuclear weapons storage, a feeling of total insecurity and the possibility of the Chernobyl disaster happening again. Yet the accident was part of the past, a catastrophe of Soviet times. I quietly researched it all at a distance because the story was not mine. It was that of my grandparents. And my feeling of insecurity was my anxiety. Then the war in Ukraine started.
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