Peilung#8. Coping. Encounter at the daadgalerie, Berlin

Peilung#8 With Olga Gaidash and Variable Name (Valeria Karpan and Maryna Marinichenko)

daadgalerie
Oranienstraße 161, Berlin
September 2, 2025, 19.00-22.00

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Coping is the latest installment in the Peilung series, which was initiated by Lada Nakonechna and Bettina Klein in 2022 and is made possible with support from the German Federal Foreign Office through the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. The series offers artists, filmmakers, and scientists from Ukraine a platform for presenting their work as well as forum for discussion.

The English term “coping” has an ambivalent etymology, incorporating both the idea of a protective cloak (from Latin cappa) and the Old French couper (to strike). For Peilung #8, the works by Variable Name and Olga Gaidash explore diverse ways of dealing with loss—whether collectively or through introspection, mentally or materially.

Olga Gaidash presents her project Phantom Museum, which she conceived with Daša Anosova and realized in 2024, together with Ivan Bazak, Violett e a, and the Warsaw architecture studio Centrala for the opening of the MSN Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. On behalf of the Phantom Museum, the artists created copies of historical artifacts without having access to the originals stolen from Ukrainian museums by Russian occupiers. The objects are free interpretations based on the memories or imagination of team members.

“War forces us to rethink the interrelationships between body, land, and memory since we have lost our connection to almost everything we knew and loved.” Variable Name
In the film So Close You Can Almost Touch It by Variable Name, the protagonists engage in conversation inside a virtual cave. It is part of an interactive installation that enables a multisensory experience in which memories are made physically tangible. Stories deeply embedded in collective memory, such as the flooding of settlements during the construction of the Kakhovka Reservoir in the 1950s, resonate with present-day tragedies: in 2023, the Kakhovka Dam was destroyed by Russian troops, unleashing a flood disaster. Once again, the danger persists that the memory of these places will be erased and overwritten by new narratives.

Picture credit: Variable Name/Назва змінна: “So Close You Can Almost Touch It” (2025), video still