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- Problems of Periodization of Geological Formations: Sample №11
Marina Shchehelska
“During a study of a paleontological site along the railway in the Nemishlyanskyi District of Kharkiv, biogenic objects were discovered that do not correspond to any known morphological types. The unexpected characteristics of these structures challenge established notions of the sequence of geological epochs and point to the possibility of unaccounted gaps in the chronology of mass extinctions.”
The project constructs a myth while subjecting it to a pseudo-scientific analysis, employing the language of paleontology, stratigraphy, and museum attribution. The installation functions as an imagined scientific complex from the future, where attempts to reconstruct the past encounter fragmentation, loss of context, and gaps in knowledge.
The work proposes to consider memory not retrospectively, but from the perspective of the future — as a process in which certain life forms, events, or entire ecosystems disappear so imperceptibly that over time even the tools for recognizing and understanding them vanish. The phenomenon of extinction here is framed not only as a biological or geological event but as a point of intersection between forgetting and attempts at reconstruction, where scientific knowledge serves simultaneously as the only instrument of understanding and a source of blind spots.
Marina Shchehelska is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Kyiv. She graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture and the École supérieure d’art Dunkerque–Tourcoing. She works across performance, sculpture, printmaking, photography, and artist books. Her practice explores transformations of the internal logic of life and the shifting norms that have emerged as a result of the Russian war in Ukraine. Central themes in her work include memory and forgetting, which she approaches not as opposites but as integral parts of a whole. Her practice is framed as a search for connections and pathways of understanding between past and future, collective and personal experience, as well as between those who are “here” and those who are “there”.
