My project examines how cultural loss is produced, circulated, and made legible through media systems like museums, archives, and news images. It focuses on what happens when artworks are not only removed, but mediated, photographed, catalogued, and remembered through absence.

Rather than attempting to reconstruct what was stolen, the project operates through refusal. It refuses images, and the completeness of them, refuses the authority of the archive to stabilize meaning. Using the form of an artist’s book, reconfigured as an unbound, material archive, the work asks how absence itself can become a medium, and how soil, frame, and void might function as evidence rather than illustration.

The project began with the Kherson Art Museum in Ukraine. During the Russian occupation of the city in 2022, almost the entire collection, nearly ten thousand works were stolen. What circulated afterward were not the paintings themselves, but photographs of what remained: the empty frames leaning against museum walls, documented in news reports. I never encountered the artworks themselves. And my only access was through these secondary images - journalistic photographs of absence. The museum here exists as a mediated archive, incomplete, displaced, and reframed by systems of visibility.

The book is unbound. Instead, the container performs the role of binding. Each sheet can be lifted, reordered, and displaced. Reading becomes spatial and unstable. Earth settles into the embossed grooves. Over time, the pages register contact and pressure. As the inner box is removed, the soil shifts. The archive is no longer fixed, it accumulates materiality.

This project does not attempt to recover what was stolen. It stages the impossibility of recovery. It shows how loss is produced through extraction, mediation, and institutional framing. By turning frames into negative spaces and soil into an active material, the work transforms absence into a form of evidence. The form of the box is tactical: the crate is a container and a logistical object. It can be labelled, sealed, and shipped elsewhere. That mobility, the same infrastructures that move and protect art are the infrastructures that can dispossess it.