The interdisciplinary project Making Oddkin by Maria Proshkovska is presented as two parallel exhibitions: at OUTPOST Gallery in Norwich, UK and at the Centre for Contemporary Art in the frontline city of Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine.

Co-commissioned and presented as part of the Platforma festival (October 2025), produced by Counterpoints Arts.

Maria Proshkovska works with Ukrainian grain burnt by missile strikes as living evidence of loss, resistance, and the potential for recovery. The artist began this project in 2023, presenting a five-hour performance Farina at the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna (MAMbo). Documentation of this performance was since purchased for the collection of Central Saint Martins College and is now part of the college’s curriculum.

The exhibitions in Zaporizhzhia and Norwich feature a photographic object, new video film, and installation. This installation is largely made of adobe, a material traditionally used in various cultures for construction, symbolising the need for collective labor as an act of mutual support.

Proshkovska creates conditions for dialogue between the gallery spaces in Ukraine and the UK. Viewers in Norwich and Zaporizhzhia become co-habitors of a shared landscape, formed through co-presence and mutual sensitivity. Making Oddkin is the search for new forms of closeness and responsibility between cultures, based on shared values and care.

This is an edited version of a conversation between Maria and OUTPOST Chair, Rae Jones that took place during the exhibition.

Rae Jones

Maria, could you tell us about the conception of the project and the significance of the simultaneous presentation in Zaporizhzhia ?

Maria Proshkovska

The concept of this project is built on Donna Haraway’s ideas of ‘Staying with Trouble’ but not been stuck in this trouble. So the ability that Ukrainians are showing every day since the full scale Russian invasion, of just continuing life, celebrating life, having coffee in the midst of ruins and then bringing it back to life and continuing, having dreams and hopes. It’s connected to this idea of it’s not even a rehabilitation, it’s “abilitation”. We have to make daily life happen in these difficult circumstances.

We don’t have time to postpone our recovery until after the victory. We have to think about recovery and healing right now, and being with this trouble.

When I received an invitation from the OUTPOST Gallery to have a show as a part of Platforma 2025 I realised this opportunity is not only about my show, it’s about a challenge for me to do something as a socially engaged artist. To bring people together and let them have a chance to know each other better.

And it is very important for me to have the connection to Zaporizhzhia in the project. Zaporizhzhia is a frontline city maybe twice the size of Norwich that everyday stands strong no matter what the enemy does. Working there just a few weeks ago I saw how resistant and at the same time tired citizens are, soldiers are, but there is so much life in every moment.

To bring the two spaces close together, to create a common landscape – with almost the same exposition and installation made from the same materials and also we offer a way for people there to know that they are not isolated – we have a tablet in the foyer with an open channel for people in both places to communicate, and that simple thing can be very powerful.

Can you tell us about what is we can see and we start space and the significance of the materials that that you are presenting

The film is a video documentation of a performance I created in June this year in Bulgaria on a beach near the Black Sea. The Zaporizhzhia region lost its access to the water, due to the occupation . And here we are not far from the water on Norfolk coast – I feel like it’s a second home for me because it sheltered me and my son in the midst of this full scale invasion. I was in a very vulnerable position where I and will always be grateful for how my son and I felt so welcomed and most of people’s hearts were open to us. So that’s why I decided that the water is important in these spaces.

We started filming at half past four in the morning and somehow I had around 40 people who had all come to help and I said to them, you’re ruining my conception! It’s supposed to be tiring, this hard manual work on my own to show how difficult and impossible it is. (laughs)

I am making the building material adobe from straw and clay, a very common practice for the whole of Europe and for Ukraine and for UK and the mediaeval times. And in Ukraine, it was always vey much like a community practice. So my idea was working on my own and being tired and to show how difficult it is when you are on your own with this huge trouble.

A very talented editor, Anna Sorokolit, helped me to put it all together in a film. In Zaporizhzhia, I went for an adobe installation, but here we went just for a dry one because we decided it would be really nice to let people have an opportunity to walk and to be a part of this project, to be a part of this installation, and bring something to it. To feel rather than to think.
I find that performance is a very beautiful and super powerful medium, very political. If I am a part of the project, if my body is there, you cannot ignore it because I am a woman, I am a former refugee, I’m a mother, I’m a Ukrainian. But it has one disadvantage. It cannot last for four weeks day and night – shame! But we can document it. In this case I was playing with the space and I wanted to give a feeling that I am here and the process is constantly ongoing.

I think the use of grain in the work that was burnt by drone strikes is very powerful. Can you tell us more about that?

Russia started to deliberately shell all the grain infrastructure in Ukraine in 2023. And it’s not only about Ukraine being targeted, it’s about world food safety being targeted because Ukraine is a bread basket for a lot of countries. And all this grain I am working with was shelled on the port infrastructure, being prepared for the export to third countries. I started to work with it in 2023 – I performed a five hours durational performance at Modern Art Museum of Bologna, (MAMbo) , curated by Lorenzo Balbi and Giulia Pezzoli – which was previously a big public oven, Forno del Pane, built by Mayor Francesco Zanardi at the beginning of 20th century, an important place for the Emilia Romagna region as a food food safety guarantee, and also as a community-building space.

It was very difficult to bring this grain from Ukraine but I wanted to show how difficult it is to be on your own, to work on your own, to fight on your own, and to say thank you to Italian, Bolonian people for sheltering me and Illia (my son) in 2022 when the full scale invasion happened. And also through these shared values, to tell a story how similar we are, how similar things are important to us, like bread, daily meal with a family. I took some pictures of this grant with my old film camera, and I wanted to bring a little bit of grain here as well for people just to see. It’s real consequence of war and it’s the human civilisation that is being destroyed, not a military target.

From your perspective, what’s the significance of cultural solidarity since the full scale invasion?

It’s super important – we cannot underestimate culture and arts. I had a privilege to give a talk recently to students at Newcastle University and they wanted to support Ukraine and to create an art exhibition dedicated to it, but then they realise they have to raise £5,000 and wondered if maybe it is better to send this money directly into the front line. And they asked me, what do I think? And it’s a tough question, right? You never have a right answer, but my opinion is that art is significantly important for resistance, and it’s a front line as well. Because the enemy always denies the culture of the country or the nation they invade. Like, “it’s not a real language, it’s not a real country, they are a satellite”. Or they steal culture, pretending it is theirs (such as claiming Malevich as a “Russian” artist. And if they cannot steal, they just destroy it.

So when the culture exists, it means we tell our story to the world, we exist, and solidarity here is very important. In this case, it (this exhibition, for example) helps to bring Ukraine into the context, not only because of the problems and the war, but because of the art.

At the beginning of full scale invasion we had all over the world so many reactive projects, like everything dedicated to Ukraine and Ukrainian artists, Ukrainian art, and it was the right time for that kind of project because it was just an immediate response.

Now we have to find a way for a more thoughtful, more deep, fundamental, maybe philosophical approach for building stronger connections and dialogue. And I think it’s a security issue for everyone – for you, the same as for us, because no one actually is safe when there is a terrorism. It’s a matter of intention and ideology.

So this is how we try to stay connected. We try to stay together and this is how we can resist, not only resist and not only exist, but also to build something in the future.

Maria Proshkovska (b. 1986) is a conceptual and socially engaged artist from Kyiv, who currently lives between Ukraine and the UK. Her work operates at the intersection of performance, installation, and feminist criticism, exploring themes of memory, trauma, corporeality, and gender-determined social processes. Proshkovska completed a master’s programme in Performance: Society at Central Saint Martins, UAL. She is a scholarship holder of international programmes and has participated in numerous exhibitions in countries including Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Italy, Austria, Japan, and Taiwan. Proshkovska’s works are held in the Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection, MAMbo, Shcherbenko Art Centre and in private collections.