Wherever you go, the horizon stretches before you—the same thin line splitting the sky from the sea—blue against blue, though the sea is called Black. Black as an all-consuming void, one that cannot be reached, yet one from which there is no escape.

Wherever you go, even if you do not take a single step—the sea is everywhere. It lingers in the taste of salt and sand left on your lips, tangled in your hair; it seeps into your skin like a memory—one that is both warming and wounding at once. For the greatest fear is that this feeling may one day vanish forever. Like a trace of water under the burning sun.

Dasha Chechushkova’s exhibition, Immersion in blu(r)e, plunges into the depths of loss, sorrow, melancholy, beauty, nostalgia, despair, emptiness—an overwhelming ache that hollows and dehydrates— two tragedies, human and ecological, unfolding simultaneously.

Artist invites the viewer to gaze upon the horizon—a metaphorical embodiment of the Black Sea of Odesa—through a textile sculpture sewn from fragments, patchworks of other people’s lives and memories, torn away and reshaped by war. She offers a daring gesture: to become like this war, called "inhuman", by taking what once belonged to others. To alienate, to alter the landscape, to claim another’s memory, to carry it away. There is no metaphor here. Saltwater only deepens thirst—it does not quench it. Take it, cut, tear apart, divide stolen memories, plunder resources, lay claim to the land beneath your feet.

History is boundless.

A small tragedy gives birth to a greater one, meddling the human stories, ruining people’s ordinary lives and affecting still life; it blurring away what seemed to be the last remnants of emotion. Like it never happened. However, soon feelings return, stronger than ever. Like waves—one after another—displacing thoughts, emptying the soul, amplifying the silent screams of another’s pain to the brink of madness. And so, again and again, the cycle repeats, weaving together “eternal recurrence” and “piercing beauty”—where pain is born from simplicity and weightlessness, coexisting with horror and death.

How deep is loss? And what if it never stops?

As the artist herself writes, “Endless repetition will not help those who long to be heard.” Yet, despite everything, she repeats, and repeats, and repeats. Each time anew, through every image, every state captured in the twenty etchings of her series A Guide Before Confession.

Artist looks upon the horizon and moves toward her sea. Perhaps to confess, perhaps to say goodbye, perhaps to wander the shoreline without thought.

And then, just as she reaches it, there is nothing. Only the afterimage of water. There is emptiness—not black, but a pale gray, perhaps drained by sleeplessness, exhaustion, fear, cold, and shock—just as human skin pales under strain. But this is not human skin. It belongs to Earth. Sickly, brittle, weighed down by its past.

Now it is the sea that watches, gazing upon the frozen human figure, waiting for what comes next.

A salt-laced sand burns against a cheek, it comes with the wind from the South—a place where they were once happy.

Not a tear.

– Kateryna Iakovlenko