Summer, 1976. That shot landed, Jury Rupin must have thought as he pressed the shutter of his camera again and again, taut with anticipation. Outside a dairy shop on Castle Street in the Old Town of Vilnius—a space now occupied by the luxury hotel “Artagonist”—a man in a light blue jacket swings at another in a brown suit. A few bystanders hover, puzzled, around the scene, yet no one seems to intervene. Some simply move on. Hardly anyone appears to know what sparked the quarrel, and just as abruptly as it began, the fight dissolves again. Rupin is almost mesmerised by it. No KGB officer rushes in to reprimand the brawlers, to fill out reports. In Kharkiv, Rupin’s hometown, such a moment would have been nearly unthinkable; photographing it would have felt far more ominous, and the threat of sanctions far more immediate.

            Rupin’s friend, Boris Mikhailov, stands beside him. He, too, photographs the scene, yet he never showed his pictures. Perhaps he only takes them to steady Rupin’s nerves. “Without me, Jury would never have dared take that picture,” Mikhailov laughs, fifty years later, standing in an exhibition shaped in no small part by his own photographic legacy: Ukrainian Dreamers. The Kharkiv School of Photography, on view at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art, just a few hundred meters from the site of the fight. [...]

           [...] When the Olympics begin, this theater has long since begun. And it simply doesn’t stop — not even when it is at its most beautiful. It presents the spectacle as if nothing has happened. It treats the ordinary as if it were an event. It is a walking aid for forgetting. Forget the icon. Forget the imperial act. Forget the Olympics. Bury the heroes in the frenzy of observations, or carefully preserve them in a carrier bag. Right in the middle of the hustle and bustle lies the space for renewal. The circumstance is wherever you are standing. But it’s better not to stay in the same spot for too long.

Exhibition Views: ARENA, Galerie Springer, Berlin, 2026

           [...] Here, in Berlin, in a place where wars and genocides happen only somewhere far; where theatre is mostly made for the intellectual’s entertainment; and where drones happen to be simply what they used to be—a filmmaker’s toy watching the world from above—I begin to wonder. Am I just rushing for the next dopamine hunt whilst frequently travelling to Ukraine, avoiding to take up the burden of advancing change in the country I was born into? Am I, ultimately, a Dopamine Superman, too, pretending to act just to avoid real action?

           It is the day after another deadly Russian attack on Kyiv. Hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles reached the city, destroying apartment buildings, killing 31, injuring hundreds, and depriving millions of a calm sleep, many of whom are my close friends. As I watch an avalanche of devastating posts on my Instafeed, I ponder over whether I should share a story, to do at least something, to raise at least a tiny bit of awareness that this war keeps going and that one day, it may come here, too. I decide not to. I feel like it would not change anything.

            I switch off my phone, and look out of the window. Outside, a gloomy summer rain sets in, pattering on the streets in front of my windows, forcing pedestrians waiting for the tram to gather under the roof of the stop. The tram arrives. People step in. The tram leaves. The rain goes on. More people wait for the next tram. And the next. And the next. Some people go back home. Others go to work, and go back home after. Others go to a bar, only to return a little later. The rain stops. People still wait at the tram stop, but only a few remain under the roof. Some seem to look into my window. Others watch their phones. Until the next tram comes. I wonder if they feel useful. I wonder if they found purpose. I wonder if they’d rather submit to occupation, or fight against it. I wonder if they think they have a choice. I wonder, sometimes, how not to believe in Jesus? [...]

How Not To Believe in Jesus was written for and published in Solomiya No. 5

           [...] The gold medalists don’t shine like stars. They are illuminated by the floodlights under the stadium roof and the popping of flashbulbs from hundreds of cameras, whose light is reflected by gleaming faces where a medal glitters. These faces then glow brightly on the living-room TVs in people’s homes, lit by LEDs and accentuated by a commentator’s euphoric voice, which intensifies the light and noise.

           Jean-Luc Godard would often tune in. In a 2001 interview with the sports newspaper L’Équipe, he said that television was dreadful by and large, but he liked watching sportscasts because they didn’t lie. How could they? They turn competitive sport into theater. Theater can’t lie; it has its own inherent truth, the truth of the great story.

           The massive win.

           The thumping defeat.
           
           The surprise comeback.

           The underdog.


           Hardcore training, an international public profile, doping, and money all go into producing a great story in sport—and ideally a combination of these ingredients. Can you ignore the big story? Stand with your back to the stage? Make like you’re looking at hieroglyphics when the stadium display flashes up “WR” to indicate a world record? [...]

            [...] It is a cold November evening in Kreuzberg. Olha, who has just turned 31, is having a birthday party in a small two-room apartment. Kyiv is the city where she grew up and celebrated her 30th birthday. The walls of the apartment are mostly white, the furniture provisional and the bedroom is equipped with bare mattresses. The next move might come at any moment. After a few hours of dancing, chatting, and drinking, a number of the party’s guests gathered around the kitchen table. Most of them moved to Berlin only recently. They began to wonder what word best describes their current state of existence:    

            Are we a diaspora?

            No!

            We might become a diaspora, if we stay here.

            Yet, we’re not building anything here, there’s no space for planning.

            But we’re also not refugees.

            No, we didn’t flee the war. We came here as we were looking for opportunities.

            I left because I didn’t want to serve in the army. I am technically a defector.

            Maybe we are expats. [...]  

Written for and published in Solomiya No. 3

With Typ/Traube/Tross, Sebastian Wells visually examines why young people support nationalism, using Flanders as an example. In portraits of uniformed members of a nationalist student fraternity and in his examination of illustrated books from the Nazi era as well as the collective memory of passers-by, he analyses the identity construct of right-wing extremists and their ideas of community. The artist sees his role as that of an archaeologist, as his images create a visual environment in which the past inextricably intersects with the present.

Exhibition views: Typ / Traube / Tross, Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin, 2024

            [...] The biggest deception was, of all things, a photograph. Dated 1962, the small picture, barely larger than a postage stamp, shows two men on the Old Bridge in Heidelberg. The man on the left is young, slim, well-dressed and looks a bit like me. On the back of the photo is written, among other things: Wells.
  

           It is not him.

           Walter Wells was already 56 years old in 1962. As it turned out, he grew up in Vienna with six siblings, a Polish passport and Jewish parents. Samuel, his father, and Josephine, his mother, were actually called Vogelhut and were among the first to come to the Austrian capital from what was then Galicia at the end of the 20th century and apparently enjoyed a good reputation before those who later imitated them were disparagingly dismissed as “Eastern Jews”. Samuel and Josephine died before the worst could have happened to them when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938. Walter Vogelhut and most of his siblings took flight and left Europe.

           

           Two years later, he received an American passport. He is now called Walter Wells, as he has been since his arrival in America. He lives in splendid houses in Hollywood, marries his wife, Mary Parker, travels to France or England from time to time and apparently to West Germany at the end of the 1950s.


           He meets my grandmother, who, in her early 20s, could be his child. He takes the young Sigrid with him to London, not just on a business trip, but to the registry office. In posh Westminster, the daughter of a war criminal marries a Jew who may not even have told her that he is one. After only two years of marriage, at the end of 1961, Walter Wells drives to Juarez by car and may have to queue up behind his equally rich neighbors from Hollywood who, like him, wanted to get rid of a marriage without red tape. Walter divorces Sigrid a year before my father, Andreas, is born. Although “Walter Wells” is on Andreas' birth certificate, Walter only gave birth to his surname. There was another man, a man from Spain, whose only known name was Gonzales. [...]
  

Exhibition views: A Garden of Roots, Werkschau HSBI, Bielefeld, 2023

Realized for and published in Solomiya No. 2

Realized for and published in Solomiya No. 1