MoMA Poland 6th Kyiv Biennial 2025
Challenge
Well known Ukrainian artist, Lesia Vasylchenko, had been commissioned by Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Poland to create a unique sculpture for the 6th Kyiv Biennale in Warsaw. Lesia has been fascinated by the impact of data preservation for humanity for many years and wanted to show the temporal scale of data preservation —technologies capable not only of storing master narratives written by media or history makers but also of preserving records of the lives of "average people" as a centre piece in her sculpture. The work is meant to look monumental, minimalistic. The work come from a speculative future in which everything that happens on our planet is recorded and successfully stored in an eternal library.
Solution
Working with Lesia and MoMA Poland's exhibition curator, we worked through different types and options of data to be preserved as well as a range of 5D Memory Crystal sizes to accommodate the sculpture design. It was agreed that the preferred cultural data preservation would be in the form of a music file containing a traditional Ukrainian folk song recording.
Outcome
The data was encoded on to a 2 inch round crystal that was placed within the piece which acts as a speculative memorial exploring how grief, memory, and ecological devastation are preserved across human and deep-time scales. Lesia commented: 'this piece remains relevant and does not lose its conceptual significance. It is important not only to showcase the technology itself but also to comment on the changes it will bring to memory, the way we produce and store information, human perception of time, and our understanding of "futurity."'