Art of Remembrance brings together contemporary artworks created through residencies at World War II remembrance sites across Europe. The artists were invited to spend time in places shaped by the war, working with archives, landscapes, historians, and local communities to create new works grounded in direct encounter rather than distant interpretation. The exhibition approaches memory as something fragile and ongoing, shaped not only by monuments and official narratives, but also by material traces, everyday gestures, and forms of care and survival that persist across generations. Trees marked by explosions, underground structures reclaimed by nature, diaries, songs, domestic objects, and bodily presence form a shared vocabulary through which the past is revisited and re-experienced.

​

​The title MATKA by Juhana Moisander carries a double meaning: in Polish, matka means “mother,” while in Finnish it signifies “journey.” Moisander encountered this linguistic coincidence in archival testimony, where a deportee described the rhythm of a departing train as repeating mat-ka. The word thus becomes a conceptual hinge linking maternal presence, forced travel, separation, and loss. Rather than presenting historical events directly, MATKA approaches the aftermath of war through metaphor, repetition, and affect. Instead of reproducing the religious motif of the Pietà, the work uses it as a visual entry point embedded in Polish cultural memory: a mother and child appear at human scale within a darkened, enclosed space, inviting an intimate encounter. Their stillness, punctuated by subtle movement, evokes care, vulnerability, and suspended time. Sound forms a central layer of the installation. Drawing on children’s songs and lullabies as carriers of collective memory, the soundscape references a Polish lullaby whose calm surface conceals unsettling turns, allowing gentle forms to hold rupture and loss. Through this interplay of image, sound, and spatial containment, MATKA reflects on how trauma persists in bodies, rhythms, and language, proposing remembrance as a shared and fragile space shaped as much by care and presence as by absence.