Open Group: Years

The Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio presents Years, an exhibition by the Ukrainian collective Open Group, curated by Angel Moya Garcia. Following their acclaimed participation in the 60^th Venice Biennale (2024) with the project Repeat after me II in the Polish Pavilion, Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga return to Italy with a site-specific project conceived for the spaces of the Tenuta. 

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and supported the armed uprising in the Donbas, initiating a period of low-intensity conflict and eight years of mounting tension with Ukraine and the West. In February 2022, Moscow launched a full-scale invasion, initially aiming to capture Kyiv. The attack was repelled, forcing the Russian army to concentrate its operations mainly in the east and south of the country. Over the course of 2022, Ukraine regained significant territories, but by 2023 the war had turned into a war of attrition, marked by static frontlines, massive losses, and an increasing use of drones and artillery. Russia sought to consolidate its control over the Donbas, while Kyiv launched counteroffensives with Western military and economic support, achieving only limited progress. In 2024, the conflict further hardened, with both Russian and Ukrainian attacks penetrating deep into each other’s territories, while the international community oscillated between long-term support for Kyiv and attempts at mediation. Today, in 2025, the war remains open and uncertain, with no clear prospect of resolution.

According to the most recent data from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), released through the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU), any number of casualties and injuries is extremely approximate, sensitive, and uncertain. The United Nations emphasizes that the actual number is likely significantly higher than any estimate, report, narrative, or statistic, as many deaths and injuries in occupied or heavily contested areas cannot be independently verified. The United Nations does not provide official estimates of military losses, either Ukrainian or Russian, due to the lack of reliable channels for independent verification. This information is derived from official reports by the OHCHR and the HRMMU, which remain among the most internationally recognized and methodologically transparent sources.

In the installation Years, projections of dates engraved on gravestones expand into space, transforming the passage of time into a slow flow of light that moves across the headstones. This luminous rhythm not only marks the passing of years, but also evokes the end of relationships torn apart by war, the fragility of memory, and its stubborn persistence. The exhibition unfolds as a constellation of video works occupying the exhibition space, translating the devastation of war into a tangible, sensorial form, dissolving the abstract coldness of numbers to restore to the viewer the raw immediacy of loss—something that cannot be reduced to statistics. These works speak not only of conflict, but also of the persistence of memory, of presences hovering in space and traversing its silence like echoes of past lives. Behind each work beats a multitude of lives, connections, and stories that refuse to disappear.

In this context, the collective’s work manifests as an act of testimony—a gesture that, by preserving what war seeks to erase, opens a space for denunciation, awareness, and the processing of loss.