Video (Footage from the H.S. Pshenychnyi Central State Cinema, Photo and Phono Archive of Ukraine,

family archives, postcards, YouTube, CCTV, drone footage, news clips, videos from the frontline=

56 min. 

2025

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The work recreates a century of Ukrainian night, combining video recordings of the night sky from 1918 to 2025. 

It  transforms linearity into simultaneity: the video seemingly embodies one long night, with the entire century taking place at the same time, in a continuous flow.  It comments on the generational nature of trauma, and its continuity through a century of history.

The stars we see in the night sky may have long since burned out, yet their light reaches us with a delay of millions of years, lagging behind our gaze. Information, like this light, overcomes technical, temporal, and political barriers. In this work, using media archaeology of moving images, historical periods are recognized through the materiality of the frame, which changes along with the technological means of its time. Night captures both significant historical events and the everyday stories of ordinary people—from the industrialization of Donbas, where my grandfather worked as a miner; to the construction of the Dnipro Hydroelectric Station and the electrification of cities in the 1950s; to the blackouts of our present time.

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This video also speaks of histories that remain undocumented. Night is a time for alternative stories, while daylight is associated with the discourse of the Enlightenment, which emphasizes rationality and evidence. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, the work suggests that night erases established systems of knowledge and conceals within itself all that is unwritten and undocumented—the hidden voices of those who have witnessed history but have not yet been heard, waiting for the right moment. Night reveals a past that never fully disappears, continually returning as a ghost of history that shapes both the present and the future.