“Yes?” Said the first girl.

“Amanda.”

“Who’s Amanda?” Asked the second girl.

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Thank God I slept all evening. I laid down at 19, and woke up at 23:30. Thank God I went home.

Kyiv forces the insomniac to face his fears of sleep. The winter nights are too cold. The warm nights are frightening. Living on a top floor, even if it’s low, you’re scared the drone that’s been intercepted will strike your roof, and kill you through the crumbling ceiling. Any flash of light is shocking. I sit on the edge of the bed, and stare at the sky. 3:28.

The sound of an explosion nearby is horrible. It’s a splattering.

In the Carpathians that smell. It burning. The smell of smoke. The smell of a cloud. I look up and see the black mirage of a cloud passing. And as morning arrives, and wind blows, trees rustle, birds chirp, the air turns to the smell of fertilizer. Rich black soil. And the blood spilled for it.

Thank God that I slept. The smell in my apartment. All the windows open. All my black clothes and bed sheets billowing on the balcony, absorbing the pink morning air. All my cotton will smell of the bloody bombs, ballistics. Ballistics are always noticeable nights. They’re fast, and you cry, I want it to stop. I can’t take it anymore, please. You plead, but with whom? Alone in the stairwell, at the bottom of the stairs by the metal door, hoping or just wondering, if the missile hits the top floor, my floor; if it enters through my open windows, will I get through this door while the building crumbles? The inhabitants in the photos, covered in dust and rubble, the very next day. Ukrainian Modern Art. The air smells of tinged blood, fumigated, vaporized, turned to dust, covered in its own dust. The unknown noise, you can’t imagine it. The sudden fear that you will die. It’s going to happen. So thank God, I fell asleep on my couch.

The noise is what drives you crazy. You want quiet. The sound you hear in your blood the next day.

This show, Threshold of Noise, is driving me crazy because it’s impossible to photograph. Its first day of installation was after a huge attack. Borys and I didn’t come. Bolsa installed The White Cross on a Black Square himself, alone. At the opening, Bolsa informed us it was both stressful and sad. The artist had found himself in his room, alone.

That’s where his story as an artist begins, after locking himself in his room for 6 years. The toys he so often uses in his studio practice are possibilities he couldn’t afford as a child. Now he can, thanks to a rigorous career trajectory that includes representing Ukraine at the Venice Biennale in ten years. And on the other side of this magic spell cast into the universe is an omen. I began seeing them as I returned to Kyiv in March. This was not the city I had left. It was crumbling. People were sick. Everyone unwell. The omens began as I arrived, and an artist with a studio at Nahirna22 was leaving Kyiv for an indefinite period, claiming, something bad is going to happen. That night was a horrible bombing. The next day, Bolsa installed alone.

At the center of the gallery in which I sit by the window, stands a free-standing cube with the proportions of a crucifix; The White Cross on a Black Square. Hanging from the ceiling, touching the center of this monument is a white cross made from the window frame blown to smithereens one evening. Thank God I hadn’t spent the night in the gallery.

Icons and votives hang on the faces of The White Cross on a Black Square. In March 2026, the Ministry of Culture and Science in Dusseldorf, granted a 400€ grant to make a joint project called The White Cross on a Black Square with Bolsa and the trained architect, Borys Medvedik, a regular contributor to the music project, Drones for Drones and the art / research group commercial public art.

A set of five votives hang on The White Cross on a Black Square. One such object is a letter from the Ministry of Culture and Science in Dusseldorf, alongside the artist’s proof of concept: Ukrainian Modern Art. That is, a clear box of rubble, and the black-and-white photograph of the building that granted him these materials.

Opposite of this construction, is a single set of eyes, repeated in a checkered wall of Vasyl Stus posters. A softened monotone face. Stus is a scary story.

Vasyl Stus was born in 1938, in a little village called Rakhnivka of Western Ukraine. A poet, Stus was arrested twice by the Soviet authorities. Before the first arrest, he was both barred from continuing his PhD at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature in Kyiv, and fired from his job, after he attended a protest against the imprisonment of Ukrainian intelligentsia during the premiere of Parajanov’s film, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1965.

In 1972, Stus was arrested for the first time, then served five years in a forced labor camp, and two years in exile, for dissident activities that included writing against the Soviet Union.

On the second arrest, Stus was sent to the forced labor camp, Perm-36 where he died. He was buried at another prison’s cemetery, and four years later his remains were returned to Kyiv. In 1990, the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union finally closed his case due to a lack of evidence.

1972, the year of his first arrest, Stus wrote a poem, How good it is that I’ve no fear of dying:

“

How good it is, that death I’m not afraid of, nor
do I ask how heavy is my cross.

Before you, judges, I do not bow
in premonition of unknown realms.

That I lived, loved and didn’t gather defilements,
hatred, curses, regret.

My people, to you I will still return,
and in death I’ll turn to life
with my suffering and with no anger on my face.

As a son, to you to the ground I’ll bow
and honestly glance into honest eyes of yours,
and in death, with my beloved homeland I will coalesce.

— Vasyl Stus (my translation)

Як добре те, що смерті не боюсь я
і не питаю, чи тяжкий мій хрест.
Що перед вами, судді, не клонюся
в передчутті недовідомих верств.
Що жив, любив і не набрався скверни,
ненависті, прокльону, каяття.
Народе мій, до тебе я ще верну,
і в смерті обернуся до життя
своїм стражденним і незлим обличчям.
Як син, тобі доземно уклонюсь
і чесно гляну в чесні твої вічі,
і в смерть із рідним краєм поріднюсь.

— Василь Стус

“

In the quiet colors of this show, The White Cross on a Black Square stands as a skeleton, casting black shadows. The light passes through the two sculptures, Road to EU and Маю збою тільки після поранення / I have weapons only after injury.

A syndrome of inferiority inspires a person to compensate. This compensation appears in plastic expressions of that great abyss of inferiority that has no objective form. Pure feeling. An inferiority complex applies a face to the deep, dark core with no end; that permanent temporariness; forever plastic. The horrible origins of the materials in these sculptures haunt the space. A familiar feeling. Unbearable to bring to the surface.

At least, that’s the philosophy of Malevich (b. 1879, Kyiv), who opened The Manifesto of Suprematism with the lines,

“

Under Suprematism I understand the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.

“

Inspired by his contemporaries in Italy, who produced art under the Manifesto of Futurism, Malevich wrote the The non-objective world: The Manifesto of Suprematism, which differed from the Italian objective representations of physical reality from every perspective imaginable. Malevich pursued the fourth dimension. Stillness. This ideal inspired The Black Square.

Bolsa’s black square reaches into the depths of building a career from the familiar feeling that fills one with depression; ruin, ash, living near death. And being recognized because of the war, as Malevich was recognized as first a Russian, despite being born in Kyiv, and developing Suprematism with Ukrainians. These differences many consider nuances, shades of grey, and irrelevant to Malevich’s “zero point,” that destruction of the old world, and the beginning of a new one.

Threshold of Noise by Yura Bolsa and Borys Medvedik, however many kilometers from the zero line, concludes the first year of Анна.

A fresh new catalogue with delightful character descriptions and fun facts about the works on view is now available to those who ask.

xx

I wait by the mailbox, wondering if you’ve read my letter. Watching the clock for your response.

Three little words.

What’s their Paypal?

At dawn on 29 August 2025, an intercepted Shahed drone destroyed studios and windows in the Institute of Automation at Nahirna 22, where Анна is located in cabinet 205. More than 20 artists lost windows and archives in the attack. The summer show at Анна, Sound of Silence, absorbed much of the shock; yet the smoking room lost a tall window, as did the central gallery where a full panel window leaped onto a sandbag in a bed of sand. This grotesque shatter is no longer on view. In the absence of 3,000 kg of sand, the wooden floor now stands fresh in the ever-present blue evening light; wet and scrubbed.

No Name by No Artist presents four glass mementos found in the rubble, and set on pedestals; each chiseled by the force of this russian strike. No Name by No Artist supports the next show: an installation of stained glass windows by one craftsman and one painter, both with studios at Nahirna 22. This stained glass will be sourced from the Baroque city of Lviv, assembled at Nahirna 22, and installed in Анна’s smoking room and central gallery.

Images by Polina Polikarpova of No Name by No Artist are available upon request.

Mementos are personally delivered and installed. ​

Анна presents Sound of Silence, a solo-show by Kyiv-based artist Maksym Mazur (b. 1990, Reshetylivka), for appointment only. A public reception will be held on 23 August between 15:00 and 19:00. Sound of Silence closes in September.

Sound of Silence emerges from Mazur’s series Traces as a single, site-specific installation.

3,000 kg of sandbags sit against closed windows and white walls, absorbing the reverberations of explosions. Sand covers the wooden floor, thwarting footsteps and capturing their soft, unique prints. Alone with the day, visitors pace the room, carving the floor with their thoughts. Rays expand the room with heat and light, then thin into moonlight tracing the peaks and valleys on the floor. Mazur remembers silence as a safe space.

Анна presents Scent of Death, a solo-show by Kyiv-based artist Margo Rieznik (b. 1993, Boyarka). Scent of Death will open on Saturday, 14th June for the general public between 19 and 20:00. Scent of Death will remain open for visitors by appointment only. Scent of Death closes quietly.

Beyond the cities and villages, within the country’s frontlines, exists a liminal space. Here a human being knows that he's touched the abyss of death in the sudden irruption spreading through his brain. A still moment of smell; the loamy tang of trees in autumn. Margo Rieznik discovered this eponymous scent amidst the suicide-attempt of a friend on military leave. 

For Scent of Death, Rieznik has steeped thin beeswax candles in a concoction of animal viscera and earth. Each visitor receives a lit candle, and may leave it anywhere in the dark, empty room. As the candles melt, they leave behind a permanent stain; the space glows and gradually adopts the indefinite fragrance of necrosis. 

Whether neurological or magical, a sweet, rancid olfaction sweeps through a person in the near-death experience. Margo Rieznik captures this heightened dimension with Scent of Death, 2025, beeswax candles, animal viscera, essential oils.

Beeswax has a historical significance for Rieznik, who grew up in the Orthodox Church. As a child, Rieznik watched her parents light candles in prayer. In this exhibition, Rieznik pays her own version of penance—for her extant reserved place in civilian life, for her bare survival. Visitors to the exhibition, breathing and moving by default, may pay like penance, or commune with the incipient guarantee of their own rotting bodies. 

Scent of Death will be the inaugural show at Анна, Nahirna 22, cabinet 205, Kyiv, Ukraine. Appointments can be made through dear@annamaydanik.com.

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But less on that. More on my spot in the sun. My tresses sway over this wooden folding chair under my outstretched legs, crossed at the ankles. A cherry cigarette between my knuckles. Sweating in my palm sits a ribbed glass, clinking ice cubes. I fell in love with this espresso tonic in Kyiv. I pierce the floating orange slice. My belly pulsing in the sun. I arch my spine, tracing my diary with a Japanese manicure. There’s a new boy. He’s the one I’ve noticed lately. The one looking at me today. I’m due for a new one. I’ve come to this conclusion, looking at the clouds. Those in Kyiv differ from these casting shadows over London.

Less on that. More on this brisk morning. I woke to a silent spring. Around my thighs, in the joint of my shoulder, and through my temples, the sun appeared. I lay in bed, waiting for a trivoga. I whispered into the empty room, It’s cold. Where was the fuzzy ear pressed against my breast?

Open another window, he once whispered. The white curtains rippling in wet wind.

Against the tides of curfew, amidst candles melting between wooden panels, he softened his voice, What do you like in sex? The moon heavy and low.

What do I like?

The sun hot on my waist. I’d always return to bed, into his warm folds.

Where were you? he’d whisper through closed eyes.

На луне.

In the heavy sink of another day, he’d spread over my balcony, resting his elbows, smoking a cigarette. Below his shoulders, bricks crumbled onto streets. Around his black, soft hair: a country as old as him.

Gently petting his shoulder, What happened? I asked.

Chuchuh pa chuchuch, he leaned into the window.

I moved circles along his spine, sensing his Шаришь?

Шару, I whispered. You can’t go home, and it’s not clear what’ll happen to your brother. After the front. Behind the green treetops, a gray obstruction of Saint Sophia. We could’ve smoked, with a clear view of her and Saint Michael, if not for this Hyatt. How much should I have raised for the Armed Forces of Ukraine to knock down this gray hovel?

I always wanted to go for a walk with him. Through greenery and public parks. In the afternoon, we’d return to my bed. On top of bedsheets, where I drifted. The safest place in Kyiv, where my heart beat to his listening. His skin smelled of sweet almond flour. My father said it’s good to have complexes, I breathed, to work on yourself, I exhaled.

He laughed, It’s like cutting yourself with a knife to work on yourself.

As our day dissolved into a gray evening, he appeared in my mirror. On the wooden dresser, lay a glass of perfume. Now I’ll smell like Anna, he smiled in the mirror. I caught myself, in dreams of a real life.

I lick my lips. Smoking dries my eyes. I flick ash.

We sauntered down my building’s conctrete stairs, and he straightened his voice before my concierge—an old, gray pillow. They bantered respectfully, without trust; beyond his duty to her sons.

I shift in the sun. Stirring the orange, sipping the cool tonic.

Across the subtle turn into evening, we stepped into the street, bruising with the city. I asked, What’s your dream in life?

It’s embarrassing, he looked away. And so did I.

I rub out the cherry cigarette in a crystal ash tray at my feet. The clouds hot and the sun disappearing.

I looked into his dark eyes, against Sophia’s золоті domes. His hands held my elbows, and he kissed me on the lips. Always as if for the last time.

The sun passes. I walk home.

On the eve of Sunday, the sixth of April, in our Lord’s year twenty twenty-five, I sit on a couch with a peer, shoulder-to-shoulder, when the first strike hits us. Her green eyes still. Their reflections shiver. The second strike hits closer. We scoot up, closing our knees, wrapping our arms around them.
She sends Telegrams.
Always with you, I say.
It hurts her. I wait for the third strike, nauseous because I snagged her. What legitimacy does an artist and her groupie have?

Istanbul is ablaze with protests after the Istanbul mayor, İmamoğlu, was arrested a few days before his nomination as a presidential candidate in the upcoming elections to rival the Turkish president, Erdoğan, who’s been in office since 2003 — first as prime minister, then as president.

Serbia has been in a state of emergency for six months, since a railway station collapsed and protests began against the responsible corruption, calling for transparency and accountability.

The American stock market has lost 11.1 trillion dollars since Trump took office this January. The American working class must keep up with tariff prices.

I remain frivolous.

On 24.04.24, year two of the full-scale invasion of Russia into a sovereign Ukraine, I arrive at Contemporary Istanbul Bloom. I’m wearing a red, ruffled shirt that looks sculptural, like an eager labia.
I wish I were wearing Trussardi’s Le Vie di Milano, that smelled of plums, dates, pepper, cream, and cardamom, drying hair and oud.

All press is seated on soft white pleather cushions.
Everything is so old, whispers into my ear a darling, curly-haired architect, eyeing the art fair’s white booths, carpeted floors, convention center.

So begins story time with Ali Gureli, Istanbul Bloom’s chairperson, presenting us Art World Economics.

Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu watches with spread knees, shifting back and forth, side to side, resting his thick fingers on a shaved chin, smiling with a closed mouth, and never pushing up his rimless glasses.

Transactions have increased, but values have declined, primarily due to a drop in auction sales. There are fewer opportunities to buy high-segment artworks. Yes, everyone’s bought all the Picassos! Gureli laughs and continues, Contemporary Istanbul makes local, Turkish art understood by the world, and along the way, teaches galleries how to exhibit in fairs and grow accordingly.

Mustafa Taviloglu of Istanbul presents his private collection of 2,400 artworks.
Most importantly, chairperson Gureli grips us, This was his decision. Not some curators! He motivates young collectors. Despite near bankruptcy, here and there, Taviloglu sold only assets — never any of his collection! This is why I think he’s a wonderful guy! Gureli cries.

Mayor İmamoğlu carries the lesson forward, The character of Turkish society resembles European tradition, but when it comes to art, the Turkish art scene resembles North America’s; where private entities and foundations form the basis of funding, unlike Europe’s public funding network.

Chairperson Gureli continues, Collector families support development, so this art fair is more of a festival, with its talks and initiatives. We never want to become a blue-chip fair. It’s for the future, to open up new markets.

Mayor İmamoğlu spreads his knees, exclaiming, Istanbul is going to boom in the coming year because of ongoing projects.

Yes, competition is mounting between the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and the Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Gureli grows hot. The Istanbul Municipality is restoring abandoned buildings into galleries and studios to build Istanbul’s soft power economy. Soft power is the engine that has propelled change! They cry in unison.

Gureli, That’s the only way to create an art scene, if collectors have the chance to collect! A collaboration between the art scene and the municipality triggers more and more openings. The goal is international collaboration — to host international artists and residencies.

And we have cats! Mayor İmamoğlu laughs.

How things have changed since Turkey’s 1923 Independence, when art institutions were state-run. Now the market controls history.

Economically, Mayor İmamoğlu sighs, We’re not in a happy situation. But with soft power….. Istanbul could outmaneuver President Erdoğan.

He continues, We’re raising democracy awareness. What can we add to history? How can we support local institutions on an international level? With 16 million residents in 39 districts. We’re doing our best to include all of them! There’s a huge culture in the art league. In the upcoming ten years, we want to be named top two, three in the world. We want to present Istanbul from a different perspective. We want Istanbul to be free because creative cities are free.

A journalist raises her hand, Are you going to buy anything at the fair?

I’ve always been humble, but with art, there’s a greed in me. I want to grab it all. I’m trying to be patient, but inside, I’m not reflecting what’s outside. I really appreciate the creative. If I were born again, I’d be an architect. Now, I support a gallery that serves children. I’m not owning any art, just borrowing. This is how I define myself. I gather artworks with the people.

We’re dismissed politely and dissolve into a deck of gallery booths.

Gallerist Pyramid Sahat stands next to a naked girl made of wax under a bed of chains.
He announces to cameras, lights, and journalists: For the Turkish Ministry of Culture, contemporary art does not exist.

The maze ends at Koli Art Space, a gallery in Istanbul.
Artist Kubra Vzun makes a Beetlejuice-esque musical: drag queens singing in Lubanca, a queer slang used in the '80s and '90s by the transsexual community in Istanbul, says Ikin Zeybek, a photographer who gives me his magazine, Ned’s Fanzine.

He speaks gently, flipping through stories of where queers can be, instead of in the... obvious place. If you experience yourself as you are, it’s easy for you to receive harassment, he says.

We leave the fair, stepping through beams of spring sun. Turning a corner, the group's Art Newspaper Moscow journalist shakes the magazine in my face, flipping through its cocks choking hard men, goggling without a whistle of irony or levity, You know. I can really be locked up for bringing this home in my suitcase.

Your trial begins tomorrow. Monday, 17 March 2025. On trial against the state of Illinois is Michael J. Perham, 1971. He killed you, on Tuesday, 05 September 2023, the year between COVID and now, whatever that is. You’d have a hot take.

I’m not there at the court house, like I wanted. I regret not going to Illinois after your funeral to ask everyone who met you the night you left. They all wrote about you on Facebook. The older women from the bar. To see where you were a regular.

To die at 25. I’m on a couch in a warm apartment amidst rain. I’m wearing wool socks, and drinking hot tea. I’m in good company. Imagine, a girl at 26. She’s made it through attempts at her life. She sits with me in the rain. A record plays. A hopeful, optimistic voice, weighed with sadness. Attentive and fast. She’s graceful. I relax in her hold of the room. Where I think of you, Maha.

And now, I wait for information. I should go, for you. For the girl who didn’t make it to 26.

For my class. For the girls I realized with 25. Who taught me shame and pride. Girls who taught me to dress and speak - carefully and intentionally. I watch myself still, like all of you watched me. Like I watched you. I feel like she’d enjoy dinner with me. The girl who knew Maha. Before we left home, and Holton.

I wait for information, at what the lawyers will tell about Maha’s death, to a judge and jury. I wait by the phone and the news. Why do I wait? When I can go, and write about my peer, Maha. My equal in all regards. My superior in ways I do not know. We fell out of touch, and grew alone. When you find more people in your life, you feel warmer. The leaders we track are hot with so much humanity in their webs. I’m not as alone as I’ve felt in the past; loose and flamboyant. A past that swallowed Maha. A heat.

I’m sure of Maha’s brilliance. I hope to be sure of mine.

I watch from afar, in a war where you didn’t die.

We’re living in very interesting times, watching neo-liberalism - the idea of market expansion as a means to peace - bring a strange conclusion to spiraling wars.

The war in Ukraine has faded from the consciousness of youth beyond Eastern Europe. Thinking back to when the war first broke out, 24.02.2022, when I’d sat down for dinner with mother, and suffered brusk scoffing for our Russian-speaking. Now the youth dismisses the war in Ukraine as white people fighting white people, or as a proxy war. The latter goes so far as to sympathize with Russians, rationalizing that Ukraine does not need to join NATO; has no need for military protection, let alone invite American presence into Eastern Europe. I’ve heard, The Middle East is enough. Let me remind you of a little deal signed in Budapest 1994 by Russia, USA, UK that pledged to never invade Ukraine, on the condition that Ukraine denuclearize. Now we know Russia would never have taken Crimea had nuclear weapons been present.

But what relevance does history have to Putin and Trump? Archive erasers. Over tea my Ukrainian editor speaks to me on the subject, Moscow is getting stricter than it was in the Soviet Union. If back then they’d come to your apartment in the middle of the night, and take you to a labor camp. Now, they create a law and imprison you, so you disappear and it’s legal. Russia still operates on labor camps. You’ll get arrested for going into Red Square with a white sheet of paper. What’s the big deal if Russia wins? It is an ephemeral question, for those suffering in the West. The trouble is to connect Russian victory with America’s demise. But what difference does the Ukraine war make to a country under Trump? What difference does the Ukraine war make to Palestinian freedom?

When I was a child, my father always laughed at Trump’s anecdote: He’s walking out of Tiffany’s with a blonde beauty, and points to the homeless man on the sidewalk, You know what’s the difference between us? He’s a billion dollars richer than me. How did Trump - a Penn-educated prince - manage to climb out of this bankrupt hole? Russian oligarchs needed an American home for their cash.

Catherine Belton phrases it perfectly in Putin’s People:

Real-estate developments offered a way around the stricter US banking regulations imposed following the Bank of New York scandal and the September 11 terror attacks. ‘They couldn’t easily bring money in through shell companies any more,’ said Jack Blum, a Washington lawyer specialising in white-collar financial crime. ‘But the money then flowed into real estate in Miami, New York and London. Real estate was exempt from any kind of reporting of suspicious activity. All of a sudden you had these luxury condos springing up. No one asked where the money was coming from. If I’m a crook and looking around for someone to help cover things up, then the whole deal was how about I invest in your real estate. “I’ll do the building and you provide the cover. You’ll even make some money from it.” It became a model for the Trump Organization all over the world.’ [95]

None of us really know what’s going on, because most of us have not studied the constitution. Few us of are lawyers. Even fewer of us have parents born in the US.

As Bill Clinton publicly1 regrets pressuring Ukraine to denuclearize and agree to this American / British deal with Russia, I wonder if Biden regrets stealing the election from the Democrats. Where is our Kennedy? How has America fallen into the hands of Russia?

Have we fallen into Russian hands?

Let’s return to Catherine Belton.

Ever since childhood, [FELIX]2 Sater had been part of a vicious world in which to survive was to play a double or even triple game, changing one’s mask according to the circumstances. ‘Everyone has many faces, and it is very difficult for us to know which is true and which is not,’ said another former associate of Mogilevich. ‘They had to be like this to survive.’ [75] Theirs was a world of backroom deals and an underground economy which had operated in the shadows since Soviet times, where a single misstep could land you a lifetime in jail, or more likely a bullet in the head.

Now, our youth protests the horrendous wipe-out of Palestinians on platforms owned and operated by the heads standing on the inauguration podium. Our channels of communication are entirely owned by Trump-adjacent figures. We protest the nightly bombing holding up Trump’s greatest funders. Where do they get these funds? With our data.

Russian bombing will grow scarier under weakening air defense, until the fireworks in the middle of the night strike. Hopefully not.

Party Girl1 becomes a librarian in the end. Around the time I graduated from History of Art school, I regretted not going to art school. I believed there was nothing noble or aesthetic to the archivist. This person didn’t add anything, but what was already there.

Tuesday, 11.02: Trump fires the Kennedy Center’s archivist,2 and claims Ukraine may become Russian, after “agreeing” to 500 billion dollars worth of Ukrainian earth.3 I go for a walk, and return to Catherine Belton’s Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West at Kashtan; a wood-lined study with coffee.

When I was leaving London, the man from Zaporizhia who supports Trump because “he’s a man who’ll stand up to Putin,” taught me that the symbol of Ukraine is the Kashtan, a chestnut tree. I grew up with these in my backyard. We’d roast them over the fireplace on cold, winter nights. In summers, my father would dig their hairs from my toes with silver needles. I’d howl and cry. He’d grip my skin to his face, and wipe the bloody punctures with rubbing alcohol.

As Tuesday turned to Wednesday, curfew began. I missed my bedtime, and stayed on the phone; bantering girlfriends analyzing boys and politicians. I felt the sky humming. I peered into its vast darkness, toward the full moon in Leo. Shooting stars exploded, as the Air Force intercepted six ballistic missiles and 71 drones.4

That was very scary, and very close to you. Are you okay? Each breath punctuated. Anna? That’s so crazy. It’s all good? Nervous laughter. Is there no alert? You’re not getting an iPhone alert? Can you hide under the bed? Six missiles coming from above Ukraine. One missile coming from Crimea.5 Anna! Iranian state-owned suicide drones.6 They’re usually not that close? That was insane. I think it’s time to come back to America. I can smell the smoke. Yeah, me too. I feel like it’s only going to get worse, especially with what’s happening, she says, What’s Putin saying? Another strike. Shit it keeps going. What is that? Are they really just like dropping bombs? Silence as I put on my coat. Hello! What the fuck dude? My voice shaking. Wah! I don’t want to hang up, she says, I love you.

Around the American inauguration, I visited the National Museum of Ukraine, for its pre-Christianity exhibition7 to write about Ester’s Hot Girls Get Dirty performances; rituals; wars staged to dark wave, electronic sounds of drones in water. In a neighboring exhibition about Kyiv’s oldest stone church, the Tithe Church of the Virgin, I learned that the trident is the symbol of Ukraine. Prince Volydmyr’s crest.

In 862-879 AD, Rurik, a Norseman from eastern Sweden ventured to the land that is now modern Ukraine, and started his own dynasty, laying the foundation for the feudal state, Kyivian Rus’. The word Rus’ comes from Old Norse, for the men who row.

When Rurik died, Oleg the Wise inherited both throne and Igor, Rurik’s infant. Oleg the Wise conquered Kyiv around 882 AD, establishing the medieval city as the capital of Kyivian Rus’. Igor eventually inherited the throne, and passed it to Princess Olga, who passed it to Sviatoslav I, who passed it to Prince Volodymyr in 980 AD.

As Kyivian Rus’ modernized, Perun, the god of war, became the most worshipped deity in all the land. One day, a great mob swelled on the site of what would become Prince Volodymyr’s grand Tithe Church of the Virgin. Here lived a Christian named Theodore, who refused the mob’s demands to sacrifice his son to Perun. They responded with double homicide. By 988 AD, Prince Volodymyr aligned Kyivian Rus’ with the neighboring Byzantium Empire, and converted Kyivian Rus’ to Orthodox Christianity, requiring all citizens to baptize.

Religious beliefs began with Neanderthals, whose consciousness and abstract thinking evolved into Homo sapiens’ animism—the belief in a soul—and fetishism—the worship of inanimate objects with a soul. Kurgans appeared. The territory of Ukraine holds ~500,000 of these manmade hills, turning graves into monuments where ancient peoples could worship the land and their ancestors; past, present and future.

Discussing documentary filmmaking over the phone, a dear friend producing them whispers, “Hire an archive producer.” I met him the day I got lost on my bicycle listening to Kanye West’s Donda for the first time. He was a New Yorker in DC, fresh from an interview with the South African raised under white-minority rule. How far will Musk take post-humanism?8 How far will we stray from the Founding Fathers? Will we even know without an archive? As Trump prepares America for the largest tax cut in its 250 years, we squirm on the platforms that wait by his side. An archive producer would prove our generation’s greatest trap.

Catherine Belton concludes Putin’s People with her chapter, The Network and Donald Trump. Her final words:

The Russian black-cash networks seemed to be digging in ever deeper. Their activities, combined with Trump’s disregard for the institutions and codes of US democracy, were leading to a systemic standoff. When Trump was caught on a July 27 2019 telephone call asking Ukraine’s new president, Volodomyr Zelensky, to meet Giuliani and press ahead with an investigation into Biden, to many his actions represented an abuse of office. Trump was directly requesting a foreign power to assist him in the 2020 election. Trump appeared to suggest that US military assistance for Ukraine could be contingent on compliance with his request. For many, such actions represented a degradation of democracy, and an undermining of everything US diplomats had sought to stand for ever since the Soviet collapse. The US government had long sought to bolster democracy in Ukraine and protect it from Russian domination, seeking to eliminate the corrupt schemes that had undermined its governance. This ‘irregular policy channel was running contrary to the goals of longstanding US foreign policy’, said William Taylor, the top US envoy to Ukraine at the time of the call. [185] The only way to deal with it was through an impeachment probe.

The Russians appeared delighted with the chaos, yet also fearful about where impeachment might lead. The scandal exposed both the fragility of the American political system and how it had been corroded from within. ‘It looks like the whole of US politics is for sale,’ said a former senior Russian banker with ties to the security services. ‘We believed in Western values ... But it turned out everything depended on money, and all these values were pure hypocrisy.’ [186]

But from the beginning the Russian black-cash networks had, in part, been embedded to erode the system, and exacerbate corruption in the West. For one senior Russian businessman, Putin’s Russia posed an increasing threat to Western liberal democracy. In the impeachment probe and the 2020 US presidential race, the clash between liberal values and a Putin-style corrupt authoritarian order was reaching a denouement. ‘Putin understands that Russia can spend any amount of money it wants [on sowing chaos in the West]. The obschak, the black-cash box, has become the size of the budget, and they can give orders to the oligarchs as well. It is a mafia that has seized power, and the state is acting as the mafia.’ [187]

The system of KGB capitalism was still working. The networks were still in place.

Attached is the annotated chapter.9

But how can a business survive without social media?

Word-of-mouth. All the vulnerability, honesty, and interpersonal relationships that I’ve neglected thus far. Democracy is demanding.

My archive is full of people my age - raw, no bullshit. If I believe in my peers surviving a history, I’ll organize this archive into rhythms. Life, love and laughter.

Everyone in Kyiv seems to know each other, and I wonder if it’s because every morning after the explosions they text each other. They pick up the phone. And check-in. One-to-one. Mouth-to-mouth. Heart-to-heart.

The fog settles in Kyiv. I miss it already, thick heavy mist. I kept him from you, туман. I sleep for three days, wheezing through a swollen throat, dreaming of memories. In the dark, I’m by a pool. Over her shoulder, a shadow speaks for her studio practice, Green slime. Christmas Eve.

Do you know von ammon co?

I wake up thirsty, but it’s too painful to drink. I boil water, but hear the kettle click when I’m in bed again. The curtains are drawn. The heat is on, but the electricity is out. My hands are tied, my legs are stuck, I can’t. I’m in a Franz Kline painting. I wake, and will myself to swallow. My throat is thicker. Carpet taste of blood. I’m ready, but the Dnipro is far into the frost. I remember an air of possibility. Here there is no tomorrow. Only now. Neither here, nor there, before lightness. Where you don’t brace with discretion. This feminine dignity.

On the morning of the first shock, and the second is nearer. I close the door. I’ve left мої документів in the lining of my brown coat. The third shock is approaching, turning an enormous silver key in the burgundy leather door, padded under the silver 13 in a red diamond. I run down cement stairs, holding my hair, as if the collapsing concrete would stop at my chewed fingers. Shame on me for losing my Holton-Arms ring in the sand, afraid the rose gold would slip through the rough tumble of my swimming. I follow a silhouette of parents holding a child into the embracing sunrise, smoking cigarettes, drinking кава smelling the smoke move as the day arrives.

Exhibition A,

Approaching the New Year in an artist’s studio party, there’s no heating, but the room was smokey. Everyone warm and yellow under the arms. Canvases covered the white walls. A bullet proof vest hung in the corner, decorated with pink sequences: SEXY. As in every room, a thin, tall, wooden rack supported burly coats. In my thin, long, cotton sleeves, and Scottish red scarf, I meandered to the dining table. In a small dish huddled cooked liver, pierced with wooden tooth picks, Mama.

After the initial round, I bumped into the cutest boy there. Big strong hands. A funny twinkle in his eyes, like he was in on you. ти куриш? He opened the cigarette box. His words burly, like they were pumped from an oak-lined room; where your family is not an obligation; it’s a gift.

By the window, smoking, Do you have a studio here?

I’m not an artist, chuckling. His beard thick, and his shoulders relaxed.

What do you do?

I type, he mimics the office job.

And what did you study in school?

More typing.

Along comes a girl, towards our hooting and smiling. She lowers into his intimacy, and I begin losing the thread of conversation. They ask if I would like another drink? Yes, I understand, but what language they’re speaking, I’m not sure. They ask. It’s Ukrainian, but I understand. What? They look at each other, and the girl starts speaking slowly and suddenly. Russian. I understand what she’s saying, now. I don’t want another drink, thank you. I toss the cup, and we stand in the confusion. Carefully she opens her mouth, and pries. He cries, Since! When? Do You! Speak? Russian. Like. This!

I want everyone to understand, she rolls her eyes, wrangling the words from her chest into the barrel of her straining, impatient throat.

She pinches her fingers, I grew up in Moscow until I was 9!

Muscovite corner, he laughs coldly, his chest empty, clearing this corner.

не так не надо, she strains.

Am I that parent you pray will die? We disperse into thought. I never see him again.

In 1918, Lenin moved the Soviet Union onto the Gregorian Calendar, and the USSR swallowed Ukraine after 1921 with the Ukrainian-Soviet War. In the second summer, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and Zelensky moved Christmas + Saint Nicholas Day onto the 25th and the 6th, respectively, as a “renunciation of Russian heritage.” So why do small villages in the Carpathian Mountains celebrate Malanka, a pre-Christian holiday welcoming the New Year, on the Gregorian calendar, January 13th? In the third winter, the Gregorian date falls on a full moon.

Do you taste the freedom? Bellows an American photographer posing as a Mexican. Warm beef stuffs the cavities in my teeth. Don’t blow my cover here, he laughs, and slaps me on the shoulder, I wonder who you’ll be in three months, calling me Amish. Amish Anna I am not. I’m a Jew. The Wandering Jew who doesn’t know when is Channukah. Her biggest fear in life is that mama is not Jewish. Papa, but mama… I don’t tell this to the Odessa Jew, kissing me on the quiet cold night leaving 2024. This history between my tight shoulders.

As the sun rises onto 2025, a woman and her husband, researching neurobiology at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv die on impact in their corner apartment. Stolen lives. Drones trigger тривоги. I search the sky through my magnificent, corner windows. How do I know when the alarm is serious?

Exhibition B,

I arrive at the bar empty-handed, where he invites me to a party. I bring nothing, but absent-mindedness. A throbbing, whimsical moss covers the central room. Beneath the crown molding, hang flowers on chestnut canvas in a gold ovular frame. The stroke of midnight seals us together until 05:00.

His friend has a curious smile, when he pokes me where it tickles painfully. In the bright chartreuse room, we stand over a dining table, warm with each other. We light sparklers, and try not to choke under this table, on twelve purple grapes. This isn’t killing Russians, he opens his mouth, but it’ll have to do. We toast over home cooking; blintzes, salads, cookies, and looks at me. My cheeks burn. My eyes sharpen. So what are you doing in Kyiv? He asked in the narrow bar, lined with wood and glass bottles under white light. In the back, a single woman pours shots.

I came to make films.

About?

We just finished filming the first one.

About?

A ballerina.

His chin rises, Ukrainian? Moving his head, the spotlight blazes my intuition.

Yes, and her relationship with a French teacher.

You’re making a film about ballet? Despite the Russian propaganda.

I brace. He leans on a cane, and moves to the tall table.

JEAN-CHRISTOPHE [ 00:09:31 ] No, because here is only one language in ballet. It's French. The steps are in French. So they understand when I say glissade, assemblé. They understand. But you need to give them an explanation, and to try to help them with the technique. They need to speak, and, understand.

In this context, he drops his chin, and unfurls his hand across the wooden table. I excuse myself to the bathroom and hide. I’ve made a terrible mistake.

You’re from Kyiv?

Crimea. There are things people tell me in private. Things I never tell them.

When was the last time you killed a Russian? I ask under the chandelier. His skin smooth and bright.

Last year.

What were you doing before?

I’m a firefighter.

I’ve been here before. December 20th, in the morning frost. 14th-century stain glass blown across the asphalt. A firefighter offers me a cigarette. The missiles killed one human, and debris injured 12. A teenage girl pulled from the rubble.

Eventually I slip under the fluttering ribbons. Most shocking is the office building across the street from the gothic skeleton. Potted plants sit quietly, against the materials of unknown origin. I remember Fran Lebowitz mocking indoor fauna.

My firefighter spits and turns on his heel, leaning his red ear into the radio on his shoulder blade. A group of them run towards the corner and disappear. Maybe they’ve found someone under rubble. This rubble feels familiar. My lungs start to hurt. Is it the fiberglass? Or the cigarette. Or myself.

I’m worried about him, says my date. The firefighter sleeps, whistling gently. He was injured. Spinal.

He wakes from a nap to my hand. My date’s brought him a glass of gin, and me, watching the green room by his side. This is what it’s all for. My waterline fills with trusting wonder. This magical realism. My home when we were all in a good mood. Alone with two parents, sitting on the red rug. What else could it be? He smiles, smitten by two girls between the tall walls, and the dank foyer. A vestibule dark within the Шифоньєр. One wears a long, Cecily Brown slip, slit over pale jeans, and immense silver jewels on her bare chest and smooth arms, drawing me into wet eyeliner. She spread her fingers in Byzantine silver; studded by mother’s polished blood stones. The other girl wears white fur over thick strands of teased pine hair. They speak closely, wrapping their chins around each other. Everything glitters in the oil light. The soft chlorophyll walls, highlighted with lime paisley. Dull wooden floors. Worn white sink in the kitchen. Kneeded and kept. Whose film am I living in? Re-experiencing childhood as an adult.

I’m leaving, and the cluster under the still-life, on the sofa appear in the color of a black-and-white picture from mother’s albums. Their haircuts, honest eyes. No one’s pretending. I don’t say goodbye.

I don’t go to sleep. I get home and settle, until the first shudder. I dress without underwear in last night’s black cardigan. I slip into loafers and my wax coat. Keys, phone, wallet are in the pockets. The portable charger is on the desk, but the second shudder may be closer. I close the door, and run down cement stairs. If there’s collapse, I’ll fall through seven floors, but I was born on 7/7, I’m the luckiest girl in the world.

Exhibition C,

In the metro car, pressed against the door that opens silently and closes quickly. Queasy blonde hair under a pink hat, cuts the stranger’s green scarf; snuggly charcoaled with velvet lamb’s wool. I run along her waxy painted skin. Tight and rigid with old fat. Through daylight, an old man stops. Confused. Smiling, he looks at me. The rumbling of traffic over head. I arrived against the onslaught of camera operators with beautiful smiles holding microphones in lipstick. The firemen eat sandwiches from a lemonade stand. I stand in Saint Nicholas. Another rumble, but I brace. My train’s arrived. Missing windows on my mind. Teeth in a child. In the standing square, red Christmas arches.

Can I get your number? Asks the girlfriend beside me.

Of course! I pull my phone from tangled pockets, and read off the British number. She opens iMessage. I can’t get iMessage on this phone. Is WhatsApp okay?

She peers into WhatsApp, I can’t find you.

Maybe because there’s no service? The car thins. New eyes meet mine. Pink fingers yellow around the swaying metal supports. Try Telegram. Oh that’s on my other number.

What?

I laugh, and hold her phone, typing 11 numbers into her address book under Анна дом. You can iMessage me, here. It’ll go to my computer.

She takes the phone, and erases дом. Typing дім.

Yes, I swallow, Of course, dropping my shoulders. Home is in Ukrainian.

She switches to Telegram, I still can’t find you! I laugh, and the cry echoes. We have each other on Spotify. We leave it for later.

So where did you meet _____? The boyfriend, a variant of the Latin Paul.

Her long bangs cover bright eyes puling towards their color in the sky.

We’re from the same city, and there was an event, and we saw each other.

That’s all it takes. See your wife across the road, and run up to her, I’m going to marry you one day.

How long have you been together?

She plays the ceiling, One year, pulling her finger back.

Oh! What did you do for your anniversary?

Nothing, she shrugs, across the people sitting.

Why not?

Because it’s hard times.

Night begins. We rumble into the final station. She rises, inhale; these white, thick lashes, I cling to them, holding my breath, burning against blue eyes. I avoid the pressing knowledge we share, falling with her hand. Her soft palms rest on a distant rail. I flatten. Her sighs wrinkle. Well, have a good trip. She hugs me extra tight. I’ll see you when you get back, I tell her, swallowing love, keeping it from her.

In my apartment, I pause in the doorway. Before the alarm begins.

So what is your film about? She asked me in the underground where ballet teachers buy roses for their diamonds. She’s looking for a DV chord before we part ways.

Well there’s three characters, and two layers. We turn.

Layers? We approach a kiosk.

Like stories. She asks the shopkeeper. One is the realm that rejected them. They don’t. She’ll have to clear the stranger’s short films off her used tapes. Too underground for the digital.

Wait, so you’re saying I should keep all of these videos? They’re not mine! What would I do with them? Her train has arrived. Before I’ve hugged her, I’m walking away, Message me! On WhatsApp!

Because you have so many numbers!

Oh I have Telegram! I stop, and realize, It’s my full name! That’s why we couldn’t find it.

Hurrying, she sends me a waving fly, and a Spotify link for Volyn Field1. Oh you had AirPods! I point.

Yes, I wanted to play them but you were telling a story, so I waited for you to finish-

I hate telling stories. You should’ve interrupted me.

Really? Her eyes darken. Their edges wince, and her hips drop, knees soften. Well, next time, we won’t tell stories. We’ll just listen!

Edinburgh, Scotland, August 15, 2024 — Edward Akrout, known for his roles in Killing Eve and The Borgias, presents a reading of his audacious new one-man show, WHORE ON TRIAL, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Written and performed by Akrout and directed by Anna Maydanik, this intense and uncompromising piece runs from August 15th through August 25th, 2024, at St. Stephen’s Theatre.

Pierre Asmahan, a sex worker, finds himself navigating a labyrinth of legal and existential crises. Arrested under suspicion of terrorism during a role-play encounter gone wrong—thanks to an overzealous Labradoodle, “normally a very friendly breed”—and inadvertently entangled in a political sex scandal, Asmahan now faces the daunting possibility of a 20-year prison sentence.

As the trial unfolds, Asmahan alternates between addressing the court and relishing the audience in his twisted life, “Killing is not easy when you don't know what you're doing.” He delivers a darkly humorous account, smiling at the absurd contradictions in his desperate seek for obsession as the remedy for abandonment. WHORE ON TRIAL shifts from the sublime to the ridiculous, unearthing unsettling truths about desire and the tension between who we want to be and the darker impulses that drive us, “Truth is the greatest manipulation of all; no one dares to speak it.”

In this mouth-watering queer Jacobean tale, the audience dives through Asmahan’s memories, starting on the poor side of 1980s rural Normandy, in a Jewish home with a Muslim father and moving through the sadistic halls of a Catholic orphanage, “I felt like a destitute nobleman taken to the Gulag.” From there, Asmahan weaves through the Parisian underworld, confronting violence, and wrestling with the ephemeral bliss of selling refined obsession as the ultimate luxury, “Every woman is allowed a little moment of folly in her life. If you can emulate this, you’ll have everything.” 

WHORE ON TRIAL masterfully blends brutal realism with poetic introspection, offering a glimpse into the inner conflicts and external forces that shape Asmahan’s world. As Akrout reflects, “We are made of soul, blood, and words.” For Pierre Asmahan, language is both a refuge and a perilous abyss, “If Mimi taught me how to love words, how they could heal, Cedric taught me how they could conquer, invade your mind, destroy and rebuild your very soul…“

Oscillating between the Fop and the Rake, this unsavable beast turns virtues into vices and vices into virtues, positioning himself as a force of evil for good—a catalyst for progress through chaos and destruction,  “Adultery is a place of truth. A shelter for the monster inside ourselves. It’s a defeat. Not an exchange of value. You meet behind the lies you tell each other every day.”

“It’s a homage to the Byronic figures who give their Oscar-winning performances to the street corners. After a life of selling himself short, Pierre Asmahan finally speaks the book he never wrote,” says Akrout. 

Director Anna Maydanik adds, “Edward and I explored long, winding conversations that surpassed Pierre’s anecdotes into universal ideas of birth, death, and sex.”

With echoes of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and the dark sensuality of Stephen Jeffreys’ The Libertine, WHORE ON TRIAL promises to be a highlight of the festival.

WHORE ON TRIAL runs 15 - 25 August 2024 at St. Stephen’s Theatre, Edinburgh, 15:45 - 16:45.

About Edward Akrout

Edward Akrout is a Franco-British actor and artist. Raised in an ethnically diverse background, he grew up between France and England and then lived in different countries, including Romania and throughout Latin America. He studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, graduating in 2008. He is mainly known for his roles as the Dauphin in the BBC series The Hollow Crown and Edward Steichen in Rodin part of the Official Selection at Cannes Film Festival 2017. 

In 2022, he founded Art Shield, a non-profit dedicated to nurturing endangered artists. He is currently directing Intermission, a documentary film that follows Ukrainian stage actors who have joined the Ukraine Armed Forces. 

About Anna Maydanik 

Anna Maydanik was raised by ex-Soviet refugees in Washington, DC, where she was a director at the contemporary gallery von ammon co. She studied Art History at Syracuse University. At 26, this will be her directorial debut. 

The last line should strike like a lover’s complaint.

You should never see it coming.

And you should never hear the end of it.

-Suzanne Buffam, On Last Lines, 2010

Other people say what I’ve yet to think; that’s what a hot woman does. She knows how a good game feels, and laughs at the unspoken punchline. Challengers reminds you of life in your own body.

Zendaya speaks over soft, crashing waves. A reprieve from the campy soundtrack.

Hitting a ball with a racket is a great way to avoid having a job.

She dusts sand from her palms, Well that’s also your problem, cause you think tennis is about expressing yourself, doing your thing. You’re not a tennis player, because you don’t know what tennis is.

What is it?

It’s a relationship… For 15 seconds there, we were actually playing tennis, and we understood each other completely, so did everyone watching. It was like we were in love. Or like we didn’t exist. We went somewhere really beautiful together.

The music unravels into froth at their feet. She faces them, her dress the color of moonlit, ocean waves. But she never plays these boys. Spinning, singing a melody that only sailors hear. A stunned, summer dawn on a clean horizon. Like a steady day after acid. Your brain an onion without the outer layer. Refreshed, lighter and clarified. Luca Guadanino leads you outside, where the boys play for Zendaya, but she gets them to play with each other. To see each other.

The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see.

-James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin, 1989

Challengers reminds you of what you’re good at. To critique Luca Guadanino would be hubris, like ignoring the pleasure of a friend’s advice.

Challengers is divided into four pivotal scenes: the moment that Zendaya explains what tennis is; the moment that Josh O’Conner leaves her: You’re not a member of my fan club? She asks him.

I’m your peer. I’m not your fucking groupie, and I’m definitely not your student; the ultimatum that leaves her crying with her tender husband, and then that windy night. And the final moment, as Zendaya lets out a gasp, and the boys embrace. You screamed. When you hit the winner. Never heard anything like it before, her husband says by the ocean 13 years earlier, but on that red, hot, windy night, that she’s driving with her other man:

You are such a fucking child, she laments, looking through the window.

Of course I am. I spent my entire life hitting a ball with a racket, he responds.

Why the fuck am I in your car?

Because you’re stupid.

You’re stupid.

I know. I’m just not as disturbed by it as you are. I don’t have nearly that high an opinion of myself.

You are the most egotistical person I have ever met in my life.

Oh, sure, sure. But I’ve never been confused about the fact that I’m a piece of shit. That’s what you like about me.

I don’t like anything about you.

No, you like precisely one thing about me and it’s that I’m such a piece of shit that I could actually see you for what you are.

And what is that?

In reality? A really, really insanely hot woman.

The third alternative result of an abnormal constitutional disposition is made possible by the process of sublimation. This enables excessively strong excitations arising from particular sources of sexuality to find an outlet and use in other fields, so that a not inconsiderable increase in psychical efficiency results from a disposition which in itself is perilous. Here we have one of the origins of artistic activity; and, according to the completeness or incompleteness of the sublimation, a characterological analysis of a highly gifted individual, and in particular of one with an artistic disposition, may reveal a mixture, in every proportion, of efficiency, perversion and neurosis.

-Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 19051

Youths lament over burning cigarettes, Europe has blocked visas for us. Huddled between Black Sea Russians, and 3 million Syrians. Everyone trudges through industrial beginnings, sweating noiselessly. May relaxes into a languid summer on the Mediterranean. Where local eyes glaze over polyester outlines. Itemized civilians in factory costumes. It’s funny how we wear them with such differing rhythms.

My taksi slows for jaywalkers. I spot her on Tarlbaşi Boulevard. She’s a tourist. You can tell by her strained limbs. She’s on the run, but still she smells of that place; leather seeping through her cooling, evaporating cement. That place eyeing her manners. Wearing luxury testers- stolen samples. Still, she admires her own reflection, against the object behind glass. Its fabric cool, green tea. A mini dress. Smooth and stiff as a Swatch, ticking neatly through her diary; a planner.

First and foremost, she’d be a guest. Cozy from her tucked-in travels, she would arrive in the evening, through a luxurious hammam visit before bedtime. The morning begins late. In the sunroom, a cloud of egg whites1 lands slowly on a pink dish with a white center.2 Green velvet brushes the soft underside of her exfoliated thighs. She sits with the Madame overseeing this Akko Residence whose story unfolds,

My parents met in Antalya. During the peace and friendship race from the Greek island Meis to Kaş. My father swims every June. That’s where my parents met. The afternoon slides into the sky. Now I have a house there. A wam and beaming fog swells around peaks of glass brutalism. Dull evergreens cast shadows stiffly.

In the taksi, this traffic rubs my driver the wrong way. His thick, calloused fingers squeeze around a thinning, crop of hair. Orange cones block our exit. I’m late-

It wasn’t boredom that bothered him; on the contrary, he began to fear that the end of his stay was winging its way toward him...the initial refreshment of his sense of time was long since past; the days began to fly now, and yet each one of them was stretched by renewed expectations and swollen with silent, private experiences. (Magic Mountain, p. 139)3

Hatayspor is playing Basaksehir. The Zuhr prayer strums braided air. My head swells. Heat rising pulls on the turgid spring. A cigarette? I croak. He eyes my crossed legs over his bent elbow, and nods. I give him one. We sit in the tunnel; avoid thoughts of the tunnel collapsing. Clouds pass.

The morning that I first arrived, alone and on my own, I met the first journalist. Where are you from? I asked her.

Moscow, tight lips spoke, Art Newspaper Russia.

Я говорю на русском языке.

Thank God, she heaved. We spent this absent morning strolling toward a bouquet of jutting steel pipes. How Constructivist! A Sadi Calik monument for Turkiye’s 50th Anniversary. Passing into the history of money at the neighboring Yapi Kredi Museum. A glimmer of the mayor’s soft power economy. Finally we reached the Istanbul Cinema Museum, and paused in the bathroom. I sat on the sink, while she looked in the mirror. All a woman needs are her work and her children. I nod.

You have children?

Of course! How old do you think I am?

Through the hinged window, a slant of calcium dihydrate diffused her unfilled irises, sharp features, bleached pixie. Pale cubes of sugar.

It’s not evening. A time for çay. On the way home, we slipped off the street. Behind wooden gates a courtyard mushroomed red brick St. Anthony of Padua. Where a ring of greens, holds a steel Christ spun and stretched through his thinning resurrection.4 She clung to my frame. Eyes glued on 16 million people.

We roll past a fellow cabbie. The men nod. Our smoke billows through open windows. The neighboring taksi throws the driver out, into our open window. I turn to our wheel. All I discern is cigarette, as he tickles his carton, and passes one to the man outside who returns to the idling vehicle, and slams his door shut. Inside, through crusty windows, a girl waves her hands, flicking her nose up, yelling at him. He’s shaking the Mademoiselle, Marlboro, Camel, maybe Muratti between the seats. He turns to the wheel, and we spot each other. There he suspends laughter. We roll forward the single meter allowed us. I wonder how old she is. Where she’s going. If she’s from Istanbul. If she works in an office. What makes her feel stuck. Whether her bag is canvas or leather. Mine is paper. I flick ash out the window; my elbow resting on the door. She’s yelling at me, waving through her open window into mine, smiling and laughing hysterically. Her silky hair reflects brown light, pinned-up halfway. I catch cigarette, and understand, squeezing my eyes. I pick a stem from my box, and reach across the warm fumes between us, into her long, gleaming nails; red and sharp. Teşekkürler, and we drive away, as her curved profile dips between the seats, into a match upheld by the watchful driver.

Nicotine is the only drug that’s both relaxing and sharpening; illuminating as a full belly from breakfast. The taksi pulls out of the tunnel. I turn my page.

It is not true clarity, but a dreamy, empty clarity that demands nothing of us, a clarity without consequences, and therefore dangerous, because it seduces us to take our ease beside it. But, if you like, let music assume its most high-minded pose. Fine! And then our emotions are inflamed. And yet the real point should be to inflame our reason. Music, it would appear, is movement for its own sake—although I suspect it of quietism. Let me overstate my case: my distaste for music is political. (p.111)

I sigh with the gentle smile of my architect. His eyes heavy with mine. The girl in the shop window would understand. How this architect won. An editor for Architectural Digest, Italia. Every groupie knows that an artist’s best works are their drawings. Gentle ringlets gathered around his supple forehead, tender in a comfortable age. A cherubic gazelle who was once a lamb. We slid across grey marble into the center of a grey Atatürk Kültür Merkezi; a series of stone, cement boxes with waffled roofs. Hungry for still, luxurious peace. Entombed behind heavy doors, we wafted into the Vitali Hakko Creative Endustries Library. The breathtaking curator Begüm Başoğlu bourréed across golden floors, on little brown eggs of heels. Her eyes bright, and neck red with an ascot. Başoğlu wore perfect, ballpoint blue denim that fit neatly around her ankles. Her petite feet in brown boots. Fashion is so important, she began, pointing to my white polo and pleated skirt; a vintage return to my girlish adolescence. Jean Patou. Father of sportswear. Susan Lenten. Bleached and glowing in her honeycomb. Subtle signs.

Each month, the curator Başoğlu selects new books for this cultural library, and with the thaw of a new year, the London Book Fair presents Başoğlu with every upcoming volume. Whole backlists wait for Başoğlu, and throughout the year, different collections talk to our collection.

A single flower in the Hakko suite of businesses started by Vitali Hakko in 1934. An entrepreneur who began with a merry hat shop, Şen Şapka that expanded into scarves under the name Vakko, four years later. In 1962, its first flagship opened; complete with a café.

People tell me, ‘You made me remember my dream.’ People postpone these things to an unknown future. Do not dwell only in one collection. Get lost in architecture, or sculpture, cinema or photography. Amazing collections erode, because you have to know what you’re looking for.

You know how very much I admire your chosen profession, but because it is practical, and not intellectual, you cannot, unlike myself, practice that profession anywhere but in the world below...I have told you of the task that has come my way only to remind you of this, to bring you to yourself, to set your thoughts straight, which are evidently beginning to become confused under these atmospheric conditions. I urge you: Consider your self-respect, your pride. Do not lose yourself in an alien world. Avoid that swamp, that isle of Circe- for you are not Odysseus enough to dwell there unharmed. (p.243)

People don’t want to go back to real life! They’re protected by books. That feeling we give people, that’s priceless. Her voice rises, and she bends her knees. I love a glimmer in the eyes. If we make a magical collection, then people will come.

She relaxes into an example. We always ask for autographs, and Peter Beard asked for more ink. He spilled it everywhere, all over her pants. She holds up one perfect finger. That resulted in one, single, unique book.

Başoğlu sings, Beauty has to touch people. People find it far away, in the distance. It has to be in the daily life. Why are we making it further? Use the power of libraries. Your vision gets clearer. Oh my gosh, Begüm Başoğlu looked at her delicate silver watch. It’s already evening! It’s the real flow felt in libraries.

She released us into the quiet drift. Oh in another life, I’d've been an opera singer, as I spot Opening Night at Scala. I wonder what my companions found. What they gathered in their window seats. I whispered with the Muscovite, What would you want to be?

Cosmonaut.

I wish I was wearing Cuir and Atlas Garden, something creamy and green, so Başoğlu would remember me as orange juice in the morning; embracing goodbye under persimmon trees. In our last words, she reveals a book she’s written, Mutual Musings.5

My new bible! I babble laughter up the marble stairs outside.

She’s lovely, and you’re crazy, the architect purses his lips in a haughty laugh, and away we sauntered, on the waning afternoon.

Stop here, I beg the driver, but he persists. I hit the stuffed leather furious with the running meter. We’re driving in circles, my teeth grind. Cats stretch soft, long backs, and slip under chain link fences. In the looming Ritz Carleton Residences, an art fair hangs two works by Ersan Deveci.6 Shadow paintings of flexing, curving toros, made only of cut wire. Breaths of the architect’s waist under my arm. That single gesture. Regardless of where I get out.

One should speak of monotony, of an abiding now, of eternalness...The tenses of verbs become confused, they blend what is now revealed to you as the true tense of all existence is the ‘inelastic present.’ (p.181)

1

David Medalla, Cloud Canyons No. 3: An Ensemble of Bubble Machines (Auto Creative Sculptures), 1961 remade 2004

2

Kenneth Noland, Drought, 1962

4

Wim Delvoye, Jesus Twisted, 2006 at St. Anthony of Padua Church

6

Ersan Deveci, Body, 2024

We arrive late, with a missing guest. The entrance has a pewter bar. The walls glow in dim, white light. Black windows skate your borrowed focus across indistinguishable delusions. You forget where you’re from in this light. A green wall ascends on our right, directing us where to find ourselves. Studies have shown this color incites hunger. Upstairs, prodding white lights scrunch and wash away an overlooked kitchen. The walls of Petite Cerise spray the mind, wiped clean. The tables are fake marble; pushed together, hiding their gold trim. Seemingly farther away from each other than four feet. No chances to really pressure someone; intertwine; share wine; stain. Unspoken thoughts haunt Cerise.

But this place isn’t easy. It’s everything a bistro has sucked away; gathered and locked away. Our waitress wears yoga slacks, black and flared. Around us, a sad white cozy hearkens WeWork. We’re eating in a restaurant unlike any other in the world. Its anonymous ambitions inspire a desire without preferences. No slights of the personal. Restaurateurs Jeremiah Langhorne and Alex Zink have developed a new form; a vacuum that only you can fill! A reverse sublime. Petitie Cerise is a true wonder.

We begin with an aperitif in casually half-filled, un-chilled glasses. One gin Martini for him, arrowed with a bowed pick valved through green olives; clear and lubricating as a Q-tip. I have a sharp, plucked cherry, soaked in noisy, well-balanced smells of purple Manhattan, broken by communal coughs. Irritated lungs.

We meet Chef Tim Ma in a mental static, clinging to every hard surface in each other’s words. Be careful what you say, everyone knows each other. Tim is not avoidant, but disregarding. Split and dried from cooking on line for a week. He walks away. I enjoy my congealed cherry. You can’t quite hear the conversation like your own self-possessed stiffness in this beaming room.

Here arrives our sommelier. Bonjour, she laughs, and smiles with a bit of self-deprecation. That self-mutilating laugh of industry folks.

We’re in the mood for an orange wine. Something mineral and dry.

We only have one bottle. It’s very difficult to find orange wine in France. She laughs, baked beans for baby teeth, chiseling our occupied space, dirty and misplaced. But we do have one! She points to the menu. Alas, they don’t have it in stock. This menu screams white, she presents the suggested bottle. An un-acidic, mineralized, dry white. The bottle warms over the evening.

I couldn’t look away. That’s some rat girl shit.

First arrives the lobster. This immortal creature. How odd. Three lettuce-folds hold its mangled, strands sticky with creamy, crunchy carrot. What is this if not fucked? One flavor pounds the sand. Another clamps my stomach.

The wine warms, relaxing a sudden flavor across the absences. Those lingering legs wrapped around tables, fingers intertwining, wine on tap, animated shadows breathing against the walls, and open, shared hums. No, there’s no where to look here. My day fills the humdrum.

Allow for plates of scallions, scallops, dollops, creams to arrive with weak asparagus, sleepy with out-of-season languish. Why rush for spring vegetables before cherry blossoms? A lone scallop soaked in sauce barigoule sits amidst barren, dusk shades of sullen, brown scallions. The wine coos our unanchored eyes with warmth, clearing sordid reactions to every swallow. Alas arrives a chicken. Its size worth celebrating after morsel portions - the most French thing about Cerise. (A pretense of France is necessary. Wifi is available.) Heaped with a penny’s worth of morel mushrooms, toppling as stiff, wrinkled bullets over a forgotten chicken under ribbed, preserved skin, waiting in a murky, city-street puddle of sauce vin jaune. Overcooked meat with undercooked vegetables is neither inspiring nor fun. The chicken on bone is taxing and messy. The flavor consistent with absence. I feel greasy.

The black bass appears, shiny and cooked in tears. Halved and filleted vertically on a narrow, wide dish. Paired with fava beans, premature and stiff with winter or merely frozen. All in beurre blanc. The flavors blossom separately. First black bass, then tarragon. Crucially Petite Cerise is only for big personalities that appreciate these gaps to fill.

And with dessert, the bottle ends. We order amaros, a Napoleon and a Pavlova, that lovely hand-whipped cream dripping raspberries, but no, the fluffy white tail arrives as dry jello. The round, silver polished dessert spoons catch our eyes. The best thing in Petite Cerise, a colorless flash.

Serendipitously, I’ve selected the single cerise on this menu. For the rest, it is implied. Never popped. Sterile. Yearning for France. I wonder what weighs on this silenced bistro. Its killed darlings. Your own dance here.