→Kyril Buhowski

Curator / Team

curator: Andreya Gandeva

Innate stubbornness takes many forms. It resides within us, sometimes turbulent and bubbling, at other times quiet and concealed. There are moments when we think it has hidden somewhere, that it has disappeared altogether. Yet somehow it keeps returning, springing from new places and taking on new forms. Sometimes these are tender memories, evoking a sea breeze, a sensual encounter, or a utopian moment filled with profound emotion. At other times, it manifests as a ceaseless effort that seems never to stop trembling, reminding us of everything beyond ourselves. Kyril Buhowski looks closely at this dynamic, which intertwines a quiet but persistent struggle with a poetic sense of care, attentiveness, and tenderness. Within the intimacy of a room, he assembles a thematic triptych comprising the installation DISTANCE, the video work INORI, and an object—an old postcard. DISTANCE, created specifically for the fourth edition of BUNA, is an installation of two “embracing” beds. The space between them reveals a distance that echoes the gesture of an embrace. A gesture that lasts only briefly, yet one the body knows well. A gesture that seeks connection but leaves an emptiness behind. It is within this emptiness that the tension between closeness and absence emerges. Distance here is more than physical. It becomes longing, a place where presence continues to exist even when the other person is absent. The video work INORI serves as a kind of window into this space. The images change while a faint light flickers at their centre. It is the same stubbornness in another form—a small core that does not disappear, even as everything around it changes. Within this persistence lies hope: a quiet gesture directed towards something beyond itself. The old postcard carries another form of presence—that of a past that seems to exist outside time and space. It is a trace of something that has already happened but continues to carry its memory. Of a feeling that, like nostalgia, saddens us through its passing and absence, yet offers a form of salvation by bringing us meaningful moments that have already taken place. The three works meet in the liminal space between touch and distance, past and present, absence and presence. They speak of a stubbornness that is the capacity to remain, to remember, and to care.