I Was Sleeping When Our House Burned Down, repair mortar, charcoal and laser print on drywall, 33 x 60cm. I was walking down the street when I noticed a man in overalls, gutting a building. I asked him to save me a piece of drywall. They were tearing out the old walls, replacing them with something new. How easy is it to replace a home with something new? Our house in Makariv stood for nearly a century, surviving the Holodomor, World Wars, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, only to be destroyed in an instant by a high-speed shell. Nothing remains. How easy is it to replace a memory with something new? All I see is fire.

Name: Alison Klymchuk
Born — Location: Canada — Ukraine — Germany

Born in Canada to immigrant parents, I spent every summer in Kyiv reconnecting with my family and heritage, bridging the cultural distance between my two worlds. After my ancestral home in Makariv was destroyed by Russian shelling, I felt irrevocably lost by the death of my roots. I relocated to Germany to be closer to my Ukrainian family while navigating the loss of our home. This journey has deeply shaped my understanding of cultural survival.

Alison Klymchuk is a Ukrainian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin, working in sculpture, mixed-media, photography and semiotics to unearth urban methodologies. She sources her materials from skip bins and construction sites, reconstructing remnants of demolished residential buildings to translate stories of erasure. Alison has mapped cities across Germany, Ukraine and North America through a process rooted in rituals of gathering and home-building in the face of colonial power structures.
Website: www.alisonklymchuk.ca Instagram: @alisonklymchuk