The Light That Comes From Darkness

December 04, 2022

By David Rosh Pina

Belongings, a photo exhibition about the Ukrainian refugees, opened on Kikar Kedumim 8, in Jaffa, until December 10th, it´s a must-see.

It has been ten months since a madman in charge of major nuclear power decided to invade Ukraine. All of us around the world have lived with inflation, higher prices of energy and fuel, threats of nuclear catastrophes, if not all-out annihilation. But the human cost of this war is the most tragic consequence. American Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, famously said, "War is hell." All wars are hell.

Israeli artist Rom Barnea traveled to Poland and developed with the Polish producer Julia Maria Koszewska, a groundbreaking video and photography project about the human price of this war.

Over sixty refugees were interviewed and photographed. The exhibition is marvelously curated. There are installations with traditional Ukrainian craft items and a heart-breaking desk installation, aka project “Mother, I do not want war”, made of war testimonies from the point of view of children which includes historical drawings by children in Poland, in 1946, and in Ukraine, in 2022. The historical drawings are preserved in the Central Archives of Modern Records (AAN) in Warsaw, in the Ministry of Education complex from 1945-1966. The exhibition "Mother, I do not want war" expresses the idea according to which humanity learned that in war the children will always be the main victims. The designers Joanna Jones and Kim Schneider Milo made a great job.

“My personal angle (for making this project) is for two reasons” explained Rom Barnea, “one is that I like to investigate what is home to people, what is it composed of. Is home just a physical structure? Is it the people inside it? Is it the stories that are being told there? The second thing is to provide the audience with a different angle about what is going on in Ukraine, because the war has been going on for months and months now, and here, where I live, in Tel Aviv, people don’t care about the war like they used to.”

The elements that made this project come true were the patronage of Old Jaffa, which provided the venue, the Embassy of Ukraine to Israel, and the Polish Institute, which financed the exhibition, through its talented programmer Julka Mackiewicz.

Poland was also where Rom met the refugees and Julia Maria Koszewska, the producer, heard his vision, and made it come alive because it hit close to home: “I had in mind the story of my grandmother many years earlier who was brought in (expelled from Warsaw) escaping from the war (…) It is an intergenerational story in my family.”

Just like the Ukrainians in Barnea’s photos show the objects they were forced to choose before becoming refugees. Julia’s grandmother who was an internally displaced person went through a similar experience eighty years ago. History repeats itself without laughing at its own jokes or learning from its own cruelty.

The exhibition is moving and more often than not you will find a Ukrainian in the corridors too emotional to look at the walls. Photographs are accompanied by in-depth interviews.

Tasha Karlyuka, writer, journalist, and a Ukrainian immigrant living in Tel Aviv interviewed all the refugees photographed and says she forgot all the words she heard in the answers she received in order to protect her own feelings. “I don’t believe this exhibition will change humanity and will change the world. People did not change with WW2 and that was not that long ago,” she says. “This (exhibition) is like psychotherapy for people who went through hell.”

Ambassador of Ukraine Korniychuk Yevgen with the Director of the Polish Institute Anna Raduchowska–Brochwicz and photographer Rom Barnea at the opening of the exhibition


Desk installation, aka "Mother, I do not want war" made of twar estimoniesfrom the point of view of children which includes drawings by children in poland, in 1946, and in Ukraine, in 2022