V (anonymous artist)

This marks the first exhibition of the anonymous artist known as V, who is soon to turn seventy. Born into a family of displaced dissidents after the Second World War, she spent her life in Crimea — the land to which her parents had fled, escaping repression and death. Following the peninsula’s occupation, the artist was forced into displacement for the second time: on the night of February 23–24, 2022, she left Crimea on the last train — once again caught between occupation and war, between homes.

The Balaclavas series is crafted from wool and recycled acrylic yarns, interwoven with buttons, ribbons, nets, beads — small traces of everyday life transformed into signs of tenderness and resistance. The balaclavas are humorous, ironic, and enchantingly imperfect — as if they laugh back at fear, play with it. Despite her near-blindness, the artist continues to knit by touch, guided intuitively by the sensation of color patches. Her fingers see more clearly than her eyes, and the threads lead her through darkness, weaving a language of resilience.

For V, the balaclava is not merely a mask of protection but a way of speaking without a face, of reclaiming a voice where privacy disappears. The work is presented alongside a video piece by a young artist of just seventeen. Both are displaced women from different generations, creating masks in search of their own presence in the world. Their gesture is not a contest of “whose pain is greater,” but a dialogue between generations: between trauma and playfulness, between experience and beginning.