Promin Festival, a festival of Ukrainian culture, has opened in the Dutch city of Haarlem. The festival began with the installation Not My Room by Ukrainian artist Vlada Ralko.

“Trauma does not belong to the past. It is an experience that exceeds a person’s ability to endure, comprehend, and integrate it at the moment it occurs — the psyche grasps it only later. But war destroys the very linearity of time: the past does not pass, it continuously invades the present. In the experience of prolonged war, trauma becomes an enduring state of deferred existence — it cannot be completed because the threat never ceases,” writes Maryna Huts, curator of the festival’s art programme, in the accompanying text.

The space of the former De Koepel prison, where Promin Festival takes place, becomes part of Ralko’s work itself. Designed according to the principle of the panopticon, the building creates a context in which the very possibility of constant surveillance functions as a form of control. Within this framework, Not My Room extends beyond a statement about the loss of home or forced migration, speaking instead about the experience of living under continuous pressure and observation — in a condition where a person can no longer reclaim a private space of their own.

Not My Room is reassembled anew each time in response to a particular place and moment. The work emerged as the artist’s response to the experience of forced migration following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — an experience shared by millions of people forced to leave their homes because of Russian military aggression in Ukraine, as well as other wars unfolding across the world today.

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