This Bird Looks in all Four Directions
25 Mar 2022
The project This Bird Looks in all Four Directions, named after a 1977 painting by Maria Prymachenko, by Dear (a postal publishing platform founded by Martha Jager) brings together – and sends out into the world – four letters by Ukrainian writers and artists: Asia Bazdyrieva, John Object (Timur Dzhafarov), Ukrainian Modernism (Dmytro Soloviov) and Kateryna Lysovenko.
Dating from February 24 to May 9, 2022, day one and day 75 of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, the letters from this series document the incomprehensible every day of living in and through the realities of war.
In the shape of a collection of text messages sent to friends, a tracklist of an impromptu album archiving a body of work, a sequence of diary entries that chronicle the lived experience of previously heavily theorised topics, and a poem dissecting the timeline of a catastrophe without a past or future, all letters reveal each writer’s individual perspective and understanding of resisting, enduring and living the atrocities of war.
