Taisia, Anya, Vlad and Samir - these are just some of the witnesses of the war in Ukraine who talk about their traumatic experiences in video works realised by the Open Group collective. The moving exhibition Repeat After Me II at the 60th Venice International Art Exhibition has already been seen by almost 400,000 visitors from all over the world. Now ...

The exhibition Repeat After Me II is a collective portrait of witnesses to the ongoing war in Ukraine, presented in the form of an audiovisual installation. It consists of two video works made in 2022 and 2024. Their protagonists are civilian refugees who narrate the war with memorised sounds of weapons and then invite the audience to repeat them. The artists use a karaoke formula, but in this case the accompaniment is not familiar hits, but gunshots, cannonades, howls and explosions, and the lyrics are descriptions of deadly weapons. This is the soundtrack of war.

The 2022 video was shot near Lviv in a camp for so-called 'internally displaced persons', and its protagonists talk about their recent experiences. The 2024 work was shot outside Ukraine, in places of safe refuge (Wrocław, Vienna, Berlin, Vilnius, Tullamore near Dublin and New York), but for its protagonists the sounds of war still remain part of the trauma. The juxtaposition of the 2022 and 2024 videos illustrates the 'progression' of the technology of war, but more importantly highlights the drastic continuity of the memory of war and symbolically expands the boundaries of its reach, placing the stories of the protagonists of the more recent work in the broader context of the current refugee crisis.

Open Group artists Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach and Anton Varga show war as a collective experience, independent of age, origin, professional and social status, giving voice to its witnesses and focusing attention on the individual experience of catastrophe.

The Open Group collective's project Repeat After Me II, curated by Marta Czyż, was presented in the Polish Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition in Venice. To date, it has been seen by almost 400,000 visitors from all over the world.