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- Cyclical of Timelessness
Shcherbyna Polina
Oh Veronica
it is not that shroud
not that blood and sweat
yet still you are merciful
to those who never ask again
charred,
half-alive,
somewhere it rots,
somewhere it heals,
sprouts into a new cure,
leaves its trace
on a linen veil,
on a pixelated shirt
again the world at war,
again the hollow emptiness.
The foundation of my artistic expression lies in the cyclicality of human suffering throughout history — a dark poetics of constant rebirth of the body in various dimensions, both spiritual and physical, where I depict corporeality within the turbulent political and social field.
The image on linen becomes an imprint of the contemporary portrait of humankind. In this depiction, which approaches abstraction, one can discern illusionary realistic fragments of wounded flesh — decaying in some places, healing in others. Neither alive nor dead, it is the tormented face of humanity.
Within this dark veil, poetry enters into dialogue with the visual element, creating a conversation through time and through the differing experiences of pain as felt by a woman and by a man.
According to Christian legend, when Jesus, exhausted and wounded, carried His heavy cross through the streets of Jerusalem, the crowd mocked Him. At that moment, a woman named Veronica approached Him. Filled with compassion, she feared neither the Roman soldiers nor the enraged crowd. She took her linen veil and wiped the blood, sweat, and dust from His face. In response to her act of kindness and mercy, Jesus left upon the cloth a miraculous imprint of His visage. This image — not created by human hands — became known as the Veil of Veronica, or the “Holy Face” in Western tradition.
Engaging in dialogue with this story, I both romanticize the gaze upon suffering through time and reveal the heavy inevitability of its nature. I shift the focus toward feminine strength — toward the sensitivity to another’s pain, the mercy for those who do not ask for it. At times, this sensitivity heals the deepest wounds, yet it often remains unseen.
Polina Shcherbyna lives and works in Leipzig, Germany. Born in Kyiv in 1993.
The artist’s practice is focused on the rethinking of painting. She reflects on its monumental origins, tracing the path from cave and wall paintings to the dome, from the individual icon to the unified sacred space. Her works reveal a dark yet poetic vision of suffering and hope, embodied in almost monochromatic images, pyrography, or carving. The central theme of her art, the core from which all subthemes emerge, is corporeality. Her works echo the collapse of the Anthropocene — a world where human dominance crumbles under the weight of political oppression and war, erasing both nature and humanity itself.
The artist creates paintings and installations with double-sided images on wood, using the techniques of burning and carving, as well as on canvas, where she applies self-made pigments based on ash combined with wax. Her installations sometimes include poetic sound as an additional element of spatial and auditory perception. One of her principal materials is unprimed linen canvas, fixed with layers of gelatin that preserve the creases, torn edges, and the passage of time in the form of folds and curves. The prototype of this technical method is the shroud. She creates images with a partial loss of information — this approach evokes the illusory nature of time, and memory becomes an imprint left by history.
She actively participates in projects and exhibitions in Europe, the USA, and Ukraine. In 2025, she presented her first solo museum exhibition in Germany, THE HIGHEST POINT OF THE EMPTY TEMPLE, at the Kebbel Villa, and was nominated for the Bourse Habib Sharifi scholarship for her installation Give The Chance On The Earth For Love To Overcome Death at the SNBA in Paris. In 2024, her works were featured in Byzantine nostalgia at Ujazdowski Castle CCA in Warsaw; the solo exhibition From Each Wound in One Day A Flower Will Grow at Gallery DIM, Warsaw; Traces of Timelessness at Künstlerhaus Sootbörn, Hamburg; and A promise of tomorrow, curated by Nicola Petek at frontviews at HAUNT, Berlin.
The year 2023 included the solo show BREACH, Episode 2 at M17 Contemporary Art Centre, Kyiv; the solo exhibition LES ENFANTS VONT BIEN at Idealfruhstuck, Paris; the site-specific project Cycle of History for Et cetera pp at Begehungen Festival, Palais Lichtenstein, Germany; Women of Liberty at Salon Mondial, Basel; and an artist residency at the Internationales Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf-Fronberg, Germany. In 2022, she joined the residency Sorry no rooms available in Uzhhorod, Ukraine; took part in FIRE and HOPE at the NTK Gallery, Prague; and completed the K.A.I.R.-Košice international residency in Slovakia, where she created Tree of Great Height Standing in the Middle of the Earth for the exhibition Living according to Sky at Šopa Gallery.
