POLAND, KRAKÓW, Apr 29 — On April 24, the exhibition Path of Most Resistance by Fabian Knecht opened at the Museum for contemporary art in Kraków (MOCAK) in Poland. Knecht created some exhibits with camouflage nets from Kharkiv and Izium, said the organizers to Gwara Media.
Fabian Knecht is a German artist who primarily does performance, installations, and photography. Since the outbreak of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, he has been actively supporting the Ukrainian resistance and volunteering as a humanitarian aid worker.
“Fabian Knecht says he never wanted to make art about war, but simply wanted to help friends and friends of friends. But it quickly became clear that returning home from volunteer missions only to talk about something else in his artistic practice felt inorganic, pointless, and wrong. An artist must speak about what they see,” said Alona Karavai, the Ukrainian curator of the exhibition.
Path of Most Resistance is the artist’s fourth exhibition under this title, following shows in Berlin in 2022 and Wolfsburg and London in 2023. The exhibition brings together works that express Knecht’s personal resistance to the Russian war against Ukraine (and against all of Europe, as he says).
The centerpiece is Laughing Is Suspicious, a large-scale outdoor installation on the museum’s facade. Measuring 40×7 meters, the work comprises hand-made Ukrainian camouflage fabrics that Knecht collected in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, and Izium, the city in the southeast of Kharkiv Oblast.
Other exhibited objects and installations are made from materials sourced directly from the war zone. Rubble from destroyed buildings, fabric soaked with ash from burned Russian tanks, and a bullet-riddled cooking pot serve as tangible evidence and testimony of the Ukrainian resistance.
The exhibition also includes several recent works by Knecht that comment on political and societal conditions in Western Europe.
The exhibition will be available for viewing until September 7, 2025.
Contemporary artists keep telling the world about the Russia-Ukraine war. Earlier, the Ukrainian director’s short film “My Grandmother is a Skydiver” was selected for the La Cinef program at the Cannes Film Festival.
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