«To the killed children».
Tapestry by Olga Tolstikova. 250×210 cm.
Wool, silk, hand weaving.
We try not to show those terrible footage of murdered children online. Little coffins, frozen mothers and fathers. And we, seeing this from afar, from different parts of the country, are also frozen, and we have no words because of the grief that shook Russia. Because of sympathy and tact, because of pain, we do not speak in vain… But this grief will never go away. Poroshenko, Zelensky, who was greeted at the UN with applause — the murderer of his people, will be forgotten, as it was not. And these children will live in our memory, they are alive.
All these years I hoped to exhibit tapestries in Paris, as I once did in 2000, at the Cite des Arts. I hoped they would respond to art, it would be a thread to the Donbass, to that tragedy. All letters went unanswered. What can be said about an exhibition in Poland, in Lodz or in Italy, in Como.
And if they responded, one, another: artists, art; as now in defense of Ukraine, shelling its own people, its own land, mining its own land, so as not to plow, sow, to be blown up? Could it be stopped? Fight for Peace before?
If artists screamed with their work, if art wasn’t silent, would there be shelling?
