2026
London

Trauma manifests itself through language. What if a set of ready-made phrases is not enough to express loss, harm, resentment or absence? The excess of feelings and emotions must find a form. Eventually, we all need a positive climax, a happy-ending or so-called catharsis. What if it doesn't come itself? During an exhibition in Versus Art (23-25 June) curated by Darico Hasaya, artists presented seven ways of giving your heart a solid resuscitation treatment.

1. Write it down. It is your own story now

Shattered (Russian Разбитое), cracked (Greek ράγισε), torn (Korean 가슴이 찢어지다), divided (Portuguese partido), ripped apart (Turkish parçalandı), crushed (Swedish krossat), fallen apart (Chinese 心碎了), or finally – broken (English obviously). The fact that the trauma related to heartbreak manifests itself across languages testifies to our human need for expression, which expresses itself, among other things, on paper.

Writing is an organised way of speaking, so it helps you understand yourself more clearly. If you organise it well enough you might end up creating a sublimated form of literature, such as a haiku, an epigram or a sonnet. In this case, however, points for hexameter, keeping the same number of syllables or regular rhymes don't count (especially since irregular ones were always more interesting) – what counts is sincerity, though a bit of finesse and flair won't hurt:

In this poem the subject snaps in two. It recalls being suspended between 'farewell' and 'godspeed', between death and life within the circle of the ouroboros serpent, because isn't it true that with every breakup we shed our skin. This breakup can also have a different dimension – growing out of the habitus of your parents or ancestors, by relearning how to live in your own skin. That's how you outgrew yourself.

As we know, in French, literature takes its etymology from the ability to write beautiful letters (fr. belles lettres). Another artist who decided to make an use of literature using its epistolographic heritage and turning it into letter-based medium is Xena Poleshuk, who turned her correspondence-based romantic relationship into a performance about an abruptly finished relationship ('No longer love letters'), adding a layer of her own feelings and emotions to the paper confessions. Using knife cuts, pastels and paints, she gave her own meta-narrative, filling in the missing closure of her love or – no longer love – story. Which of us doesn't do this? We need our own enclosures, otherwise – as the philosopher Odo Marquard writes – we die from narrative atrophy. It is precisely from this need that resentments and the negating or refuting of a previously loved person arise. Our minds don't like gaps in stories. Instead of negation, this exhibition proposes art, in this case poetry; it is one of the noblest ways to fill the gap in a narration and retrieve agency.

However, poetry doesn't have to take a written form. Olivia Pinkney gave her poem a multimedia form, creating an engaging video in which she talks about her own process of 'shedding skin':

The matrinal line that connects my mother her mother and her mother all through to Eve blood of my blood love of my love […] I've been thinking how death is like breath and sex connects each polarity […] I have a memory that feels like it's pre-birth I'm a soul looking down at the earth and being so excited for all the experience that I was going to have as a human. The great experience of joy and grief so I try to remember my soul so ecstatic to be on this earth in this body in this life

The Greeks called this experience anamnesis – in Plato's concept, before being born, a person lived in an eternal world of ideas, where they had already grasped all knowledge. Now they only have to remember it. Maybe this is where writing comes in handy? The artist plays with the perspective of sub specie aeternitatis – that is, the perspective of eternity. We all know that meme showing the earth before and after your opinion. Well… maybe that doesn't help, but ultimately the cosmos is still here for us, to relearn how to live with it in peace.

How? Another artist, Yulija Kharchenko, offers a hint in her statement about her own painting: “You know how to heal yourself - it is within your body from birth.” Maybe writing can come in handy with regaining this pre-birth, eternal knowledge that Greeks talked about? If not, we have other solutions as well!

2. Connect with your inner child, and don't cringe!

Well, I know – it sounds like pop-psychology but, I swear, it is not. I could list here a handful of long-dead white guys with long beards to back this up. I'll limit myself to a substantial quote from Melanie Klein: “Experience has taught me that the complexity of the fully grown personality can only be understood if we gain insight into the mind of the baby and follow up its development into later life. That is to say, analysis makes its way from adulthood to infancy, and through intermediate stages back to adulthood, in a recurrent to-and-fro movement according to the prevalent transference situation” (Envy and Gratitude). Although Klein called this an object relationship, her theory laid the foundations for what we today call inner child theory. According to this concept, today's impulses are the result of childhood deficits, so to fix them, you must think about your childhood self and help that child. Yes, I know – you barely remember. This, however, doesn't matter, we learn patterns without remembering their source; Daria Em managed to find hers through symbolic art.

The artist writes about her work: “My painting Fairytale represents a period of my childhood and a desire to create an alternative world where I would feel safe and where I belonged. The red mythical creature is a hybrid of a wolf and a dragon – my two favourite animals”. What is notable is that the artist chose an excellent style to present her vision, combining fauvism with symbolism.

On another occasion, the Russian artist Nikita Rekhov, inspired by Murakami's prose, decided to create a film (‘Sputnik Sweetheart (my beloved satellite)’), in which he tells the story of a relationship somewhat different from the one in the book. While the novelist talks about loss and the difficulty of understanding one another: 'And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. (...) But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.' (Murakami, ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’) Nikita Rekhov shows us two separate satellites investigating the earth – one of them sends its companion material, which it then passes on to the other, trying to bring it closer to a human way of communicating: “it looks like a language, but it isn’t,” he recalls. This understatement, paired with a deliberate delay, puts the viewer into a state of reverie. As if the author wanted to say that beyond relativism, beyond the modes of communication shaped by culture and language, there is still something else – a universal, humanistic sense of understanding that flows from the very fact that we are human. To present this through a conversation between two aliens drifting in space is a brilliant solution – after all, to understand the inside, we need an outside perspective.
Another work of Nikita Rekhov which – I feel – was also slightly inspired by Murakami’s writing is ‘Severance’. It is a story about two women stripping themselves down to ‘lumps of metal’. Naked, drawn close to one another like defenceless lovers, they must clothe themselves anew in this different, new material. This film, accompanied with collages juxtaposing architecture and the trinkets of Russian-style capitalism, brings to mind the end of one system and the beginning of a new one, which will also eventually wither away. It is worth noting that this is the only work in the exhibition dealing with systemic and economic transformations – and thus on a national scale – which further broadens the already extensive range of themes. 

3. Wrap yourself up in a cosy blanket, sew something and try to be grateful or… just sleep for a while

'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all' – says the famous words of a poet. Looking at Anastasia Egonyan's remarkably personal and formally interesting work, we can conclude that – in this case – it definitely is. I don't know whether the artist was going through a breakup or just a month-long separation, but the impulse – a feeling of longing – led to the creation of this interesting medium, combining tradition with the contemporary cybersphere. The technique originates from Kharkiv, where felters made blankets, creating smooth strips between rows of fibre, which led to creating blankets that were exceptionally warm and pleasant to the touch (today an almost forgotten practice). Adding screens to the blanket allows us to snoop into their relationship, to enter a private, intimate zone. Were it not for this separation, the artist would probably never have made this work, nor created such an eclectic medium.

In the history of art there are many paintings immortalising dreams. The Surrealists believed Freud – a remembered image from a dream was supposed to be the condensed content of our subconscious which does certain work in our dreams. Our mind finds shelter in rest, thanks to which we feel that we are gradually healing. I believe that's what Veronika Khachaturian depicts in her abstract painting.

This work is worth comparing with the painting by Max Sevchenko, who wrote words about loss on a linen-coloured canvas. The paint on the words, painted in a thick line, drips down and then fades, being a literal representation of the effect of time and a metaphorical proof of the pain easing with the passing dates on the calendar. This tactic resembles the methods of painters such as Roman Opałka and the internationally renowned On Kawara. There is, however, one significant difference – whilst these artists focused on permanence, Sevchenko focuses on entropy; which takes the form of biodegradability: the paint on the canvas loses its clarity and slowly fades away, as this is its undeniable destiny. In this way, the painting becomes an everlasting performance, which viewers can experience differently as time passes, prompting reflections on both the permanence of a work of art and human memory.

4. Don't lock yourself in…Get away!

Apparently wandering is linked to longevity, and travel sometimes has a better effect than several therapy sessions. Finding yourself in a new place, especially one that is culturally foreign, shows us other, possible kinds of life. It also allows us to meet people who carry a similar burden. Here one of my favourite Buddhist parables comes to mind: Kisa Gotami was the happy wife of a wealthy man. However, when her one-year-old child died, she almost lost her mind, going from house to house asking for medicine. Finally she went to the Buddha, who promised to heal the child if only she brought mustard seeds from a house in which no one had died. Of course, the woman, by asking about the dead, found comfort for her own suffering through talking with others. It is much easier to meet 'others' when we open ourselves up to a change of surroundings. Brittany Mariko went to Peru for a few months after experiencing her loss. These photographs are documenting her process of coming to terms with loss and new beginning.

I mentioned this Buddhist koan for a reason – in Zen schools, experiencing the impermanence of the world is important, and mindfulness and the practice of everyday life can help with this (the artist used her own paper for her drawings, which she then coloured using plants and earth). “Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible.’’ Says Nhất Hạnh, a Vietnamese Zen writer. Her photographs document process of coming to terms with loss and the inevitable course of life – towards its end.

Staying in one place, in a similar pattern that dehumanizes you might be suffocating. Maria Saukhina, an artist focused on corporeality, who during the exhibition presented us with a performative story about her Kafkaesque sense of systemic restriction, in which dance on silks intertwines with wandering through an underground labyrinth. This artwork combines elements of aerial silk, storytelling and video art to tell the story of an individual’s struggle against limitations – not only those imposed by their surroundings, but also the limitations of the human body, which in this case embodies both systemic and inherent limitations. This stands in contrast to the dualistic, Cartesian division between mind and body.

Whilst much aerial silk art focuses on building a narrative through the dynamics of alternating falls and ascents, Maria Saukhina has chosen to focus on building suspense, which compels us to ask questions about human limits, endurance and resilience. The final fall is a genuine act of letting go; it is as courageous as it is controversial, yet often necessary to preserve one’s sense of self. “To abstain from action is the only way not to be the accomplice of this world,” says Emil Cioran.

I’m sure this issue is particularly important to many people who, for economic, political or safety reasons, have had to leave their country and find their way through the bureaucratic reality of their country of asylum.

In London, the visitor encounters Patient Zero inside a white box, reading the story while music fills the enclosed space. As we do when watching the interactive Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch, we are allowed to wander through the story, moving between the patient, the nurse, the hospital, and the objects surrounding them. Then reality hits us and pushes us back, confronting us with the fact that movement does not mean freedom. We can move around the hospital, yet nobody inside it can leave as the story expands, yet still in the same way – circling round. Oskar Czapiewski, Zuzanna Czernic, and Dodo bring together literature, game design, sound, illustration, and digital media to create Patient Zero, an interactive artwork about the isolation of Poland's first recorded COVID-19 patient. There is something strange and beautiful about three artists coming together to tell the story of someone's isolation. An experience of isolation becomes the product of communal work. Perhaps this contradiction reveals something essential about being human. We need one another to remain fully alive; after all, complete isolation is its own kind of death.

Patient Zero is everywhere and known almost nowhere. The public knows him as the country's first case. The database can identify him precisely. Yet outside the small circle responsible for his care, nobody knows who he is. He becomes a collection of facts detached from who he is, known to the world only as Patient Zero. The artwork reverses this process by giving consciousness not only to the patient and the nurse, but also to the hospital, telephone, bed, medical equipment, and database. Objects begin to speak just as the human being disappears behind information. But digital life does not allow him to disappear completely. The patient remembers how, even after his divorce, shared Netflix and YouTube accounts continued to bind him to his former wife. A Strava notification asks him to send her “some freaking kudos.” The algorithm recognizes their connection but cannot understand its loss. It preserves the relationship after the relationship itself has ended. Listening to this passage feels like entering the emotional world of The 1975's A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships, where technology offers constant connection while making loneliness newly inescapable. I am writing this while listening to Charli xcx's “No One Lasts Forever.” Toward the end, David Cronenberg's voice assures us that oblivion is freedom. I believe him with my whole heart. But what happens when technology denies us that freedom? Perhaps healing a heart in the digital age requires the mercy of being forgotten, something our devices were never designed to offer. The internet leaves traces, it's a mutual process. When there are enough traces, they can add up to your image, which, however – as in the story – turns out to be outdated, because it shows you together with a person you don't want to see.

6. Accept it and work on it

'It's okay to be a little broken-hearted' – says folk wisdom written in marker on the toilet wall of my favourite karaoke bar on Warschauer Strasse in Berlin. This place can be considered a kind of temple, and one does not argue with the truth of texts carrying a whiff of the sacred. With this thought in mind, I propose looking at the work of Kristina Kolos, who created for us a diptych – a painting and a sculpture; the corresponding works build tension through the construction of contrast – an image of divinity expressed through a woman with a blissful facial expression in a Marian motif, and a heart, organic, bloody, shattered and threaded through with twigs like thorns.

To achieve such a blissful state of consciousness, we should accept a certain defect, lack or imperfection in ourselves, which is wonderfully described in the film 'Labour of Self' by Aleksa Samardzic:

one part of you being handiccapted kinda makes the other parts handiccapted too (...) Someone hurts you, bullied you or touches you a little too much when you growing up and now boom you are in your 20s arranging your cups in the kitchen symmetrically so your family doesnt die It's like your leg is stuck in between some rocks right? (...) Get the leg unstuck, wait for it to heal, teach it how to walk again. And yeah, it feels unfair, you know, that you're this great, capable person, but your leg is broken. Especially, because usually someone else broke it. like it or not you are a union of things and you need to give attention and love to all of those things, even the broken ones. Frustrating, I know. But hey, can you imagine how ridiculous the alternative would be? Running away from yourself? On one leg?

Don't let pain nest in your heart. Pull it out, examine it closely, paint on some wings, draw on a disguise and send it off into the world, godspeed – let others see how it shines on the walls of a gallery, a tenement house or a squat; maybe someone who has just had their heart broken, seeing it, maybe for a moment their heart will feel a bit lighter!

Working on yourself doesn't have to, and shouldn't, be focused on optimising profits, locking in, and searching for the best version of yourself. Melancholic evenings, time spent in silence, stargazing or meditation can allow you to quieten down and experience everything you so badly want to suppress. After all, you can't function in eternal repression. Nickie Zimov created a series of expressive paintings that tell the story of a melancholic process of healing. His intimate painting operates with cinematographic depth and a noir-type play of light.

7. And finally… Pull yourself…apart

The Heart Broken Into Pieces, torn apart, shattered, broken, divided, turned into pieces… What if we wanted to put it back together? Warhol claimed that he was never himself ('I never fall apart because I never fall together') – perhaps a fluid, or ad hoc assembled personality helps us avoid suffering, avoid being trapped in a single identity reflecting in others eyes what in consequences creates expectations and blocks changes. ‘The grammar of loss’ explores this existential topic.

‘Grammar’ as we know is a set of rules that helps us with communicating with others. Through communication, we form bonds or – in the context of the psychoanalytic automaton – we recreate bonds which, although with new people, often end in a similar way. If loss is inherent in this cycle, identity becomes trapped in a painful pattern, yearning for defragmentation, change and liberation. The artist compiles various symbols in a collage; the most significant of these, it seems to me, are the eyes and the sclera against a black background; it is as though the artist wishes to tell us that we can never see ourselves as a unified whole; rather, our identity is a dynamic collage of fragments of social roles, experiences, emotions and traditions.

Continuing this line of thought, which is critical of the Enlightenment’s notion of a coherent self, we might refer to another collage in this exhibition, created by Diego Rivera. We never fully know ourselves, our own motivations or those forgotten experiences from the future that perpetually govern us – this conclusion, which simplifies some of the ways in which psychoanalysis has influenced culture, seems to resonate in this artist’s work. In his collage, we are unable to tell whether the woman is placing a flower into or pulling it out of the man’s chest, which compels us to rethink subjectivity and decision-making in terms of collectivity and chance. Ignorance of one’s agenda and the vagaries of fate, which absolve us of responsibility (and of taking the blame for any failures).

This theme is also explored by Vitaly Krauss, who is the only artist participating in the exhibition to have chosen to use glitch as a tool to illustrate the inconsistency of subjectivity. In his video art, the filmed figure looks at the viewer, whilst his silhouette flickers, changing colour and contours; we alternately observe him and flashbacks and retrospectives that break identity free from fixed frameworks and restrictive patterns. A glitch is an error in the system, in a programmable transmission; a mistake that draws our attention to what is not working and requires attention that is necessary to heal oneself.

Darico Hasaya assisted by Furkan Aydın tackled a difficult subject, which she managed not to trivialise – what requires a certain amount of talent. To me, this exhibition seems like an obvious consequence of Darico Hasaya’s previous curatorial work. From the exhibition EV (‘home’ in Turkish), through artivism, (the exhibition: Los desastres de esta guerra in Peru, ‘I’m a woman’, UK) resilience in the face of trauma (of war, of identity, of relationships), to the eternal search for a home – in a world that, though it has always been our home, has lately been so reluctant to offer us shelter. Suffice it to say that today, in an age of housing crisis, most of us exist somewhere on a spectrum of homelessness, since only a few paychecks separate us from missing a rent or mortgage payment.

The curator is herself a descendant of war, and her practice often involves collaboration with migrant individuals, whose experiences resonate in presented works. In today’s world, where the language of marketing has absorbed the term ‘therapy’, Darico retrieves the meaning to that word, which originally (greek: θεραπεύω) meant tending, care and nurture – something we have been observing in Darico Hasaya’s curatorial work for several years now.

In closing: whilst looking at Darina Keselman’s work, another thought echoes through my mind – what if we don’t have to put the heart back together at all? ‘The heart does not heal. It becomes larger than what wounded it,’ asserts the narrator in her visual animation, which balances between a meditative perspective on the cosmos and a collection of mash-up still frames from one of our earthly lives. The animation brings to mind a reflection by Mike Cahill from the film ‘I Origin’, which, incidentally, employs a similar aesthetic, focusing on the iris and the colour of the human eye. In the film, the protagonist speaks of the atoms from which the world was built, arguing that those which collided during the Big Bang are no different from those that make us up today. The animation makes us feel both vast and tiny. After all, there are things greater than ourselves and our traumas, and however esoteric it may sound, we are part of them – that, I believe, would be an accurate conclusion. And… If any of these advices won't work, just make your own art, maybe you will find a better solution for yourself.