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Image credit: Makar Artemev<\/p>\nImage credit: Makar Artemev<\/p>\n
After leaving Ukraine in 2015 and moving to Norway, Lesia Vasylchenko began developing a body of work that confronts how war, planetary surveillance systems and ecological collapse are radically reorganising our experience of time. Working across moving image and installation, she explores the chronopolitics (politics of time) of contemporary life, touching on measures of time like picoseconds, ecological deep time and the lingering temporal legacy of conflict. For her exhibition YesterLight \u2013 Sensing Ruptures of Time at Schinkel Pavillion, Vasylchenko draws on satellite infrastructures and planetary monitoring systems to examine how technological systems of sensing and surveillance transform how time is recorded, experienced and remembered. Her work has been shown internationally and will appear this year at both the Venice Biennale and the Kyiv Biennial at KW Institute for Contemporary Art.<\/p>\n
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Image credit: Frank Sperling<\/p>\n
What can we expect from YesterLight \u2013 Sensing Ruptures of Time?<\/p>\n
I\u2019m working with different scales of time \u2013 micro and macro \u2013 as I communicate more-than-human time, showing how other things around us also carry memory and futurity. I suppose I want visitors to sense time differently. Even slightly. Even as a fragment.<\/p>\n
Much of your work revolves around time. Why are you so drawn to it?<\/p>\n
I\u2019m honestly obsessed. I read about time from any discipline I can touch: philosophy, technology studies, science, media theory, ecology. What interests me are different scales of time and how they collide. Micro-temporality is like the speed of signal synchronisation: the precision of satellites, microseconds and picoseconds, the near-real-time infrastructure that the world depends on. And then you have deep time \u2013 ecological time, geological time \u2013 and also war time. Things that extend far beyond human lifespan. I\u2019m always trying to understand our human position inside these scales.<\/p>\n
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Image credit: Frank Sperling<\/p>\n
When you left the Ukraine in 2015 just after the Maidan Revolution and the Russian invasion of Crimea, you were working as a journalist. What made you change focus?<\/p>\n
During the Maidan protests, there was a tower on the main street with a clock that had been there since Soviet times. Every hour, it played a melody: a song about Kyiv, \u2018How Can One Not Love You, My Kyiv?\u2019 Since childhood, if you came to the centre you would hear it. Then during the revolution, the tower burned down. The clock disappeared, and for me it felt like the end of an era \u2013 not only the Soviet era, but something broader. My generation grew up after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but the structures were still there: the habits, the promises. During the revolution, it became clear that we had to finally break with older structures. That moment made me think about time.<\/p>\n
In what sense?<\/p>\n
Well, growing up, the idea of the future was always present. Everything was about sacrifice for the future: study, work, discipline, planning. The future was almost like an instruction: you have to do this for the future. But then I felt that this future was already programmed, and suddenly it was obsolete. It felt irrelevant as a concept. So I started asking what futurity actually is. What does it mean to have a future, to imagine it, to act toward it? And I started thinking about time as a structure \u2013 not just something we live inside, but something that shapes politics, perception and memory.<\/p>\n
Time is an incredibly slippery topic. Everyone experiences it differently\u2026<\/p>\n
Exactly. It depends on your background, your situation, even your class. People with money can slow down time: wellness culture, self-care, longevity. For people living through war, time isn\u2019t something you slow down, it\u2019s something you manage in fragments. So if you use time as a lens, you can rethink everything: politics, capitalism, technology, generational trauma, environment, history. Time is a way of perceiving the world that is never only personal. Even the light we see is delayed. Sunlight takes eight minutes to reach us. We\u2019re always seeing something that already happened.<\/p>\n
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Image credit: Istvan Virag \/ KUNSTDOK<\/p>\n
By focusing on temporality, are you also reminding visitors of the shortness of life? The precariousness of existence?<\/p>\n
I think it\u2019s almost the opposite. I want people to imagine that there are times other than a human life. For example, the sculptures in \u2018Testimony of Tableware from Borodyanka\u2019 were collected from the same site that appears in my video \u2018Chronosphere\u2019, so they extend the video into material form. Those objects were fused in the moment of the explosion. Cups, plates, wine glasses: everything became one material. A soup plate fused to a coffee cup. That fusion is a record of one instant.<\/p>\n
Did you go there yourself to collect them?<\/p>\n
Yes. The building was still standing, but it was going to be demolished and had been looted of anything valuable. I had a friend from that town, and when we arrived, we asked local kids if they\u2019d been inside. Actually, they were playing inside it. The building was collapsing, and they were inside as if it was normal. It was shocking. War makes everything ordinary.<\/p>\n
Did you hesitate before exhibiting these works? They\u2019re a testament to something profoundly violent and horrific. People may have died in those buildings\u2026<\/p>\n
What does it mean to have a future, to imagine it, to act toward it?<\/p>\n
When I first put this work together, it was 2022. It felt almost like it was my duty to speak \u2013 especially in Norway, where I had moved, because there were almost no Ukrainian artists in the field. Often, I was the only one. That exhibition was about documenting the war, but I was trying to say that the graphic image is no longer enough. Objects can also be witnesses. They carry the exact moment of violence. The fused tableware is a witness\u2019 statement of a second in time.<\/p>\n
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Image credit: Frank Sperling<\/p>\n
In \u2018Testimony of Soil From Gostomel\u2019, another work in the show, you\u2019re exhibiting actual soil from the Ukrainian land. What was your initial idea behind that?<\/p>\n
Hostomel is where Russian forces landed in 2022, where the full-scale invasion began, and I collected soil from that exact place. It\u2019s important that it\u2019s not just any soil; it\u2019s a material witness from that location. Also in the exhibition, there\u2019s a whole room dedicated to weeping willow trees from the Kakhovka area. After the Russians destroyed the dam there, only weeping willow saplings would grow in that parched land. They grew where water had been, even though there\u2019s no water anymore. The willow becomes a contradiction: life returning out of ecocide. I dug the saplings out alive. They were part of an earlier exhibition of living trees. But then they died.<\/p>\n
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Image credit: Frank Sperling<\/p>\n
This work is deeply connected to Ukrainian folkloric history. Is this a way of preserving memory?<\/p>\n
Yes, and beside the weeping willow piece, there\u2019s a new technology I collaborated with the Optoelectronics Research Centre in Southampton on. They developed a data storage technology called an eternal memory crystal. The idea is that it\u2019s resistant to fire and radiation and will outlive us all. They produced a crystal for me, and I recorded my grandmother\u2019s voice into it.<\/p>\n
What did she sing?<\/p>\n
My grandmother is in her 90s. She went through famine, war, the collapse of the Soviet Union and now another war. She represents almost a century of history. She sang a folk song about weeping willows from the 16th or 17th century. In that song, the willow speaks to the river and says that spring will return, but youth will never return. That voice is now recorded into the crystal for forever. Instead of photographing her, I have her voice singing. So in that room you have oral history, one of the oldest architectures of data, next to a technology promising eternal preservation. It\u2019s like archaeology of memory. The methods of preservation evolve, the materials change, but it\u2019s the same structure: preservation and transmission.<\/p>\n
That urgency to record and preserve continues with your use of satellite data, especially in the work \u2018Chronostatic Rupture\u2019\u2026<\/p>\n
What fascinates me is that satellites are no longer only photographic. In the last 10 years, low-orbit satellites have been overtaken by constellations of synchronised satellite infrastructure. They send pulses down to the Earth and record how long each signal takes to return. That time becomes data. In those micro-times, you also capture information about moisture, temperature and wind, and that data is synthesised into image.<\/p>\n
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Image credit: Frank Sperling<\/p>\n
What interests you about that?<\/p>\n
It allows us to see war as a process rather than an event. War isn\u2019t a singular moment. History tends to say, \u201cThe Kakhovka dam was destroyed on this date,\u201d but the territory becomes uninhabitable. The soil is killed. Toxicity from underground mines are washed away and scattered. Pollution spreads. Scientists say it could take around 100 years for parts of that area to return to life. That duration, that century of damage, is the real event. So when I talk about testimony, I ask: \u201cWhat if nature is a witness?\u201d In court trials, testimony comes only from a speaking human, but what if we bring the landscape in as witness? It carries the duration of trauma. The longevity of damage becomes evidence.<\/p>\n
You once said that war transforms not only territory, but perception itself. How do satellites alter what an image is?<\/p>\n
Photography captures a moment. Video captures change through time. But satellite constellations produce something else. They\u2019re an infrastructure of continuous sensing. There\u2019s no single moment \u2013 no beginning or end. Images accumulate endlessly, layered on top of one another. As humans, we extract a frame and call it \u2018the image\u2019. For the infrastructure, however, it\u2019s continuous documentation.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/chronosphere2-scaled.jpg\")
Image credit: Lesia Vasylchenko<\/p>\n
Humans can only ever grasp fragments of it?<\/p>\n
I want to create a feeling that documentation and fiction, past and future, nature and technology are all present at the same time.<\/p>\n
Yes, we can only extract one thing from a planetary memory that\u2019s always recording. In psychology, there\u2019s a term \u2018chronesthesia\u2019: the ability to remember the past, imagine the future and inhabit the present at once. What\u2019s striking is that disrupting this sense of time has also been used as torture \u2013 sleep deprivation or disorientation. You no longer know when you are. PTSD works similarly: you\u2019re in the present, but reliving the past as if it\u2019s happening now. I think we increasingly live in that condition collectively. You can be physically here, yet unable to imagine a future or be gripped by a looming threat, so the future collapses into the present, while the past still weighs on you. I\u2019m interested in how that temporal confusion might operate on a planetary scale.<\/p>\n
Is that a part of you that worries that visitors won\u2019t be able to follow the complexity of some of the themes?<\/p>\n
I worry, yes. But I\u2019m making art, not a technical manual. Art is where I can hold these meanings together through form: montage, image, text, sound. I don\u2019t expect viewers to understand every technological detail. I want to create a feeling that documentation and fiction, past and future, nature and technology are all present at the same time. If someone leaves with a glimpse, a shift in perception, that can be enough.<\/p>\n
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Image credit: Makar Artemev<\/p>\n
Living away from Ukraine for so long must be hard\u2026<\/p>\n
Yes, definitely. My family is there. I\u2019m there as much as I can be, but if I have a platform \u2013 an exhibition \u2013 I feel it\u2019s my responsibility to speak. Even when I\u2019m working about ecology or technology, I will always bring Ukraine into it. If someone asks you something, you say, \u201cThere\u2019s still war in Ukraine,\u201d and don\u2019t you forget it.<\/p>\n