The Norway-based Ukrainian artist speaks with Dasha Anosova about satellite synchronisation, stolen time, and a speculative justice system that measures harm in years.
Lesia Vasylchenko maps the politics of time across scales most of us rarely think about: the microsecond life of a satellite signal, the century a bombed field needs to recover, the infinity of grief. This spring, the artist has her first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, YesterLight – Sensing Ruptures of Time at Schinkel Pavillon, and is preparing a new commission for the Venice Biennale. In February, she won the PinchukArtCentre Prize, Ukraine’s premier contemporary art award for artists under thirty-five, and donated the entire sum to support the Ukrainian armed forces through various voluntary initiatives.
She joins our call from her grandmother’s house in Rakhiv, a small town in the Transcarpathian region of western Ukraine. She’s been in Berlin for the opening, then Kyiv, and is briefly still before heading to Brussels and back again. There is no flying, only trains and buses and borders. For someone whose entire practice asks how time is lived and weaponised, she is remarkably short on her own. We spoke about satellite synchronisation, haunted willows, an immortal jellyfish, a friend whose youth was stolen by the war, and a Ukrainian word for sorrow that refuses to translate.
Dasha Anosova: You’ve had an insane schedule lately. Where are you right now?
Lesia Vasylchenko: I’m at my gran’s in Rakhiv, but I was in Kyiv for a few days before this, and before that, in Berlin, where I am based at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien residency. I can’t pull myself together at all. I might’ve finally reached the level where I can’t recover from my own schedule.
DA: It takes ages to recover from that commute with no air travel available. What are you working on?
LV: I’m preparing a new piece for Venice, which I’ll go to install soon. I’m deep in research for a new video about time travel, which touches on the questions of eternity and trauma. I’m following so many research projects, including one that studies the immortal jellyfish. It’s the only known organism that doesn’t die; it regenerates endlessly. It only dies if a predator eats it, because it’s tiny. And there are already projects trying to extract something from this jellyfish to sell wealthy people a promise of prolonging their existence.
DA: Immortality has gone completely mainstream through Bryan Johnson and his whole Don’t Die thing.
LV: You know, it’s a deeply political question. Who wants to live forever? Who even thinks about eternity when most people don’t know how to survive until tomorrow? Those places where people are surviving through war, poverty, a lack of drinking water, what eternal life are we talking about? It’s fascinating to look at the world through that lens: where you live, which layer of society you belong to, how you even speak about foreverness, and whether the conversation is relevant at all. I believe this to be absolutely a class issue.
DA: You grew up in Ukraine, but your artistic career really began in Oslo. Did you go there to study?
LV: Yes. I have a background in journalism, and I was looking for a programme where I could research image theory and temporality in the context of visual culture. I ended up at a photography school that focused on photography as medium. You study philosophy, critical theory, installation, and how to think about the photograph as sculpture, as language, as image. From there I went straight into the Academy where I was placed in Fine Art.
DA: Did you have a strong connection to the Oslo local scene?
LV: Oh yes, I ran K4 Gallery, which is focused on the moving image. Then I started my own research project called STRUKTURA. Time, and it just exploded. It ran for about four months, with twenty-one events in that period and, every other week, an exhibition in one space and something else in another. There was a video programme, shows I curated myself, a lecture series, performances and public events almost every other day. I wanted to activate the whole city and use every point of access I had. The last event was when I organised Armen Avanessian’s visit to Oslo right before the pandemic. After that, Podium invited me to work with them, and eventually handed me the whole gallery. I ran it for five years.
DA: Tell me more about your collaboration with your friend Yura. He’s a musician and is serving in the army now.
LV: Yes, Yurii Tymoshenko. He has his project Mokri Dereva, and before the war, he was a musician and worked with code. We worked on a video game environment together very early on, which was my first piece on space technology. I was looking at satellite constellations and the rapid expansion of the non-governmental space industry, driven by private and experimental infrastructures, imagining this shell of synchronised information being transmitted between satellites and beamed down to earth. He makes the music for all my videos. I call him, explain the mood, and he sends me the perfect track every time.
DA: He’ll also be the main character of the upcoming Venice piece?
LV: Yes. Yura keeps mentioning to me how he’s given half of his thirties to defending Ukraine, how youth is passing and how it will never be back. His time stopped in 2022. Sometimes he can’t even register that people around him have aged, that years have passed, because when you’re in that situation you don’t think about birthdays or time at all. It’s stolen time, for him and for so many people. The piece for Venice will be a video installation that includes a water sculpture. The title of the work is a number: the count of youth days Yura has “lost”. It changes every day.
DA: Wow. Now tell me about your exhibition at Schinkel Pavilion.
LV: It’s the perfect space for my installations. It’s so retro-futuristic, and all my work is about time and this mix of past and future. The team told me it’s not the easiest space to work with because it carries so many layers, so much historical baggage. But every room resonated perfectly with my work.
DA: And the central video, Chronosphere – tell me more.
LV: It’s a half-hour video about a speculative court of time. I propose that in the future, the international court of human rights in The Hague should accept temporalities, durations, as evidence. It would allow legal frameworks to register how power operates through time itself: by prolonging uncertainty, compressing decision-making, or erasing continuity. In this sense, duration becomes legible as a material trace of conflict, and the manipulation of time emerges as a prosecutable dimension of harm. For example, if we’re talking about a field that was destroyed in war, it shouldn’t just be recorded as one incident on a timeline. The court should also account for how many years that field will need to recover. These extended durations are not incidental; they result from deliberate decisions to inflict long-term damage, and they should be treated as part of the case.
The video explores different scales of time. It begins with micro-temporalities, the microsignals that remote sensing technologies use to collect and transmit information. Then it moves to human temporality, where I look at how long it takes my sister and her children to get from the fifteenth floor of their building down to the nearest bomb shelter during a Russian attack. The duration of that footage is the actual time they need to run down. Then there’s a section on slow violence and ecological deep time, referencing Svitlana Matviyenko and Rob Nixon. And it ends with a speculative future. Matviyenko has written about how the looming threat of the occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the possibility of it exploding, is so present in everyday life that it almost occupies the present. It’s not some abstract future that may or may not happen. It’s very concrete, but it belongs to the future. And these strange relationships emerge between speculation and reality, between statistics and lived experience, between the felt uncertainty of time.
DA: What strikes me about this idea, that the time needed for recovery should be weighed as evidence of harm, is where it leads when you think about human life. A landscape might take a hundred years to regenerate, but when people are killed, that damage is irreparable. There is no recovery. So, if you follow your own logic, the temporality that should be entered into the court record for the loss of a human life is infinity.
LV: Wow, you noticed something very important. Because the time of grief, the time of trauma, when you’re inside the trauma of loss, that is the closest thing to the feeling of eternity. When you lose someone, the mourning replaces past, future, present. This feeling of temporal totality. That whole room explores how memory and mourning are stored across technological and cultural dimensions, and how tuha is preserved. I don’t even know how to translate it. It’s not quite grief, not quite mourning.
DA: A long, aching sorrow?
LV: In Ukrainian literature, characters die of tuha. It means someone was in such a state of mourning that it consumed them. The Ukrainian language has dozens of words that signify different nuances of sadness and they don’t really translate. The room starts with a small table, on which there’s a dried branch from a weeping willow from Kakhovka, from the territory of the former reservoir that was bombed. In Ukrainian folklore, a willow that has never heard water can host the ghosts of the past inside it. They wait there to return. When the Kakhovka dam was destroyed and the water receded, in the territory where scientists initially said there would be nothing but lifeless land, these willows started growing. Willows that grew in the absence of water.
DA: Willow hauntology!
LV: Yeah, very Derridean! There are two narratives: the first is the ecocide that happened to that territory, and the second is the regeneration, the nature that arrived after the war-caused violence. One doesn’t exist without the other. Trauma and rebirth in the same place.
DA: About the crystal – I read you worked with a research centre in Southampton.
LV: Yes. I carved a wooden frame out of a weeping willow stump. Into it I placed a five-dimensional “everlasting” crystal from the University of Southampton. It doesn’t burn in fire, doesn’t sink in water, isn’t affected by radiation. It’s resistant to chemical decay. Scientists say humans will go extinct, but these crystals will preserve the history of humanity.
DA: And the last room?
LV: The exhibition ends with two works about speculative futures. The video Children of Infinity draws on a chapter by Oles Berdnyk, a Ukrainian cosmist. The other is my first future-fiction story. It’s set in a far future where the main character isn’t a person but an archival infrastructure, one that contains the entire recorded history of humanity across generations. Someone searches for a specific date – the first of September – and discovers that one instance of that day is missing. It turns out that during the Great Transition, when human history was being transferred onto the “eternal” crystal infrastructure, a coordinated manipulation took place. The narrative follows the entity’s attempt to process this absence, eventually revealing that the day was not lost to the natural erosion of time but deliberately erased through a process of weaponized forgetting. Figures of power across different countries conspired to remove certain events—uprisings, revolutions, wars—so they would not remain in the record.
DA: I think we’re waiting for a full novel.
LV: That would be incredible. But it’s a completely different level of challenge for me.
DA: A completely different level of engagement, too. You don’t spend time with an artwork in a gallery the way you do with a novel – five seconds, a glass of wine in hand, and you’ve moved on to networking.
LV: Oh yeah, literally five seconds.
