Letta Shtohryn’s project explores garments as „containers for personal memory”. Shtohryn sees clothes as vessels that simultaneously conceal and reveal the bodies which pass through them; framing and presenting the body at times of prosperity or poverty, sheltering the body during times of change. Fabric, its origins and social context, can reveal personal stories at moments in time. This project explores garments as a weave of personal and collective memory, following diachronic threads of displacement, instability, political oppression; of searching for a new home, through to times of recovery.
The habitats of Wrocław, a witness of rapid changes in the community structures through history and a city still affected by changes a lot, can co-create the art installation by Letta Shtohryn. Clothes and textiles of any condition, memories related to garments, individual stories and urban myths related to Wrocław since the beginning of the 40’s are the ingredients necessary for creating a piece, which the artist is working on during her residency in Wrocław.
How can all of you become a part of Shtohryn’s project? All you need to do is to donate a piece of clothing or textile related to your memory of Wrocław. You can bring the items you’d like to be included in the installation to the Infopoint in Barbara (Świdnicka Street no. 8B), from 11.04 till 25.04.2018. Please notice that the Infopoint is open on Monday and from Wednesday till Friday (from 10:00 am till 6:00 pm). The items you will donate will become a part of Shtohryn’s artwork, so there won’t be a possibility of getting them back, hence we encourage you all to read the information about the conditions of this call.
[Textile memories – information]
Letta Shtohryn is a contemporary artist working in various media from sculptural installations to performance art. She was born in Ukraine two weeks after the Chornobyl disaster, which has been driving her interest in exploring causality and order/chaos dichotomy since a very young age. Shtohryn has got a background in Philosophy/Sociology (University of Vienna) and Photography (The Vienna Art School). Although Letta can be found migrating between Malta, Reykjavik, Ukrainian countryside and the Arctic wilderness, she has set up her headquarters in Valletta for now.
Since the completion of MFA degree, she has worked with geophysical phenomena as metaphorical suggestions of her experience with human connections. Growing up between uncertain East and consumerist West made her art practice a result of conflicting experiences of both. A recurring interest in her art revolves around the border between states – between entities, between concepts, between times. She is interested in the point of change from one state to another, in the point of stillness turning into chaos or one entity becoming another. These enquiries resulted in experiments into tangible interpretations of forms of tension (social, physical, psychological) and research into an equilibrium of balanced forces of physical or metaphorical nature.
