#176 Making Oddkin

Maria Proshkovska

4-10 Oct 2025 Thu-Sun 12-6pm or by appointment

Maria Proshkovska's interdisciplinary project Making Oddkin is presented as two parallel exhibitions: at OUTPOST Gallery in Norwich, UK and at the Centre for Contemporary Art in the frontline city of Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine.

Proshkovska works with Ukrainian grain burnt by missile strikes as living evidence of loss, resistance, and the potential for recovery. The artist began this project in 2023, presenting a five-hour performance Farina at the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna (MAMbo). Documentation of this performance was since purchased for the collection of Central Saint Martins College and is now part of the college’s curriculum.

The exhibitions in Zaporizhzhia and Norwich feature a photographic object, new film, and installation. This installation is largely made of adobe, a material traditionally used in various cultures for construction, symbolising the need for collective labor as an act of mutual support.

Proshkovska creates conditions for dialogue between the gallery spaces in Ukraine and the UK. Viewers in Norwich and Zaporizhzhia become co-habitors of a shared landscape, formed through co-presence and mutual sensitivity. Making Oddkin is the search for new forms of closeness and responsibility between cultures, based on shared values and care.

"As I mixed the adobe myself — from clay, straw, water, and grain ash — I could physically feel how fragile particles formed a whole. This action crystallises the main idea of the project: our recovery is only possible through unity. In the context of war, the opportunity to create an atypical kinship takes on a deeply personal meaning for me. With this project, I seek to form a new body — a shared Ukrainian-British landscape in which viewers in both countries become not just witnesses, but participants — bearers of memory and hope for rebirth."

Maria Proshkovska (b. 1986) is a conceptual and socially engaged artist from Kyiv, who currently lives between Ukraine and the UK. Her work operates at the intersection of performance, installation, and feminist criticism, exploring themes of memory, trauma, corporeality, and gender-determined social processes. Proshkovska completed a master's programme in Performance: Society at Central Saint Martins, UAL. She is a scholarship holder of international programmes and has participated in numerous exhibitions in countries including Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Italy, Austria, Japan, and Taiwan. Proshkovska’s works are held in the Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection, MAMbo, Shcherbenko Art Centre and in private collections.

OUTPOST Gallery exists as a vital, artist-led platform. For 21 years, OUTPOST has provided critical opportunities for artists, writers, curators and other cultural producers. OUTPOST has brought ambitious visual arts programming to Norwich,and is dedicated to presenting new work that resonates both internationally, nationally and locally.

The Center of Contemporary Art in Zaporizhzhia is an interdisciplinary cultural cluster that brings together artists, the community, and partners to rethink culture in times of war and to support contemporary art. Their goal is to build a strong and open cultural and artistic ecosystem in Zaporizhzhia. It will contribute to rethinking the experience of war, strengthening identity, developing a modern cultural environment, and ensuring the city’s dignified representation on the international stage. They create conditions for building cultural resilience. Art becomes a force that inspires, unites, and transforms.

Platforma 2025 festival will take place in October across the East of England. This is the eighth event in a biennial series showcasing the work of artists with personal experience of migration. The festival is developed in collaboration with local artists, institutions and networks. The aim is to support cultural exchange, present projects and strengthen artistic communities. The project was implemented jointly with Havas Village Group's charitable initiative, the AIDA Foundation.

The project is implemented in partnership with the charitable initiative of the Havas Village group - the AIDA Foundation. With the support of the Zaporizhzhia City Council and the Department of Culture and Tourism, in collaboration with the BIRUCHIY contemporari art project.

Image by Gillies Adamson Semple