Alina Zamanova traces the "freeze mode" of war-torn Kyiv at General Assembly

In Alina Zamanova’s paintings, passages of sharp focus emerge from fields of turbulent energetic brushwork, as abrupt visions amid the ceaseless influx of daily experience. Witnessing the daily aerial attacks on Kyiv, the artist documents the ways in which the ongoing war in Ukraine reshapes the human psyche and the natural landscape, tracing the deep marks that endure even in moments of perceived calm. In her paintings of children huddled together or trees bending in the wind, the stillness seems forced, the silence almost overwhelming. They are reflections on the moment after an attack – the disorienting quiet and attempts at reflection that follow the initial shock. Writing on the nature of traumatic experience, the scholar Cathy Caruth points to its constant arrival and thus its lasting impact on life: “Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it?” She continues, “At the core is a double telling, the oscillation b