Polina Shcherbyna: The Highest Point of an Empty Temple

In her exhibition The Highest Point of an Empty Temple, Polina Shcherbyna explores the disappointments and horrors of the 21st century, referring to the recurring cycle of tragedy and hope that runs throughout human history. Across four interconnected chapters, she examines human vulnerability, the conflict between good and evil, and the paradoxes of human existence – among them the question of how people can sacrifice freedom and rights in the very struggle to defend them.

At the centre of the exhibition is the figure of the victim. Shcherbyna approaches this figure through sacred imagery and historical references, bringing together different moments of collective violence and suffering: the siege of Kyiv in 1240, the Second World War, and the Russian-Ukrainian War. Rather than presenting these events as isolated historical episodes, the artist connects them through recurring images of sacrifice, loss, power and survival. The past becomes a lens through which the present can be experienced, while the question of the future remains open.

In this context, Shcherbyna's work enters into a dialogue with the philosophical ideas of Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt, as well as with Andrei Tarkovsky's film Andrei Rublev. Their reflections on violence, power, history, responsibility and the human condition resonate throughout the exhibition. Sacred imagery is not used here simply as a reference to religious tradition; it becomes a means of confronting suffering and asking how images of sacrifice, compassion and redemption can still speak to the present.

From an aesthetic and sensory point of view, the exhibition evokes the atmosphere of a temple. Yet this is a temple marked not by transcendence or consolation, but by the traces of human suffering. Sacred images are transformed into artefacts of pain, carrying the memory of wounds that remain unresolved. Christian imagery, including the Crucifixion, is placed in relation to the violence of the modern world, creating a space in which the sacred and the political, the historical and the personal, come into close proximity.

The materiality of the works reinforces this tension. Shcherbyna works on unprimed linen using a distinctive palette of dark pigments. Carved and burned surfaces bear visible traces of physical intervention, while individual paintings expand into monumental installations. The works do not merely depict wounds or acts of violence; their surfaces themselves become sites of rupture, pressure and transformation. Created between 2023 and 2025, they reflect a period shaped by war, uncertainty and profound social and spiritual upheaval.

The four chapters unfold as a long-form narrative. They move between emptiness and memory, language and faith, bodily suffering and compassion. Each episode approaches the figure of the victim from a different perspective, while together they form a meditation on the relationship between power and vulnerability. The exhibition asks what remains after destruction, how memory can be carried forward, and whether compassion can offer a form of resistance to violence.

At the same time, the works address a growing sense of spiritual poverty in a world characterised by war. Shcherbyna's search for a new spirituality is not presented as an escape from reality, but as an attempt to remain sensitive to the pain of the world. Her images move between despair and hope, between the experience of an apparently empty world and the possibility of renewal.

The exhibition ultimately leaves us with a fundamental question: Is rebirth possible in a place of emptiness?

Polina Shcherbyna (*1993 in Kyiv, Ukraine; lives in Leipzig, Germany) is a visual artist and painter. She studied Monumental Painting and Temple Culture at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv under Professor Mykola Storozhenko (2012–2018). Her work has been presented in exhibitions and artist-in-residence programmes in Europe, the USA and Ukraine.