Info
What We Lost in the Water is an exhibition bringing together works by Ukrainian artist Daria Syvakos and materials from the WRO Archive. The exhibition takes its title from Syvakos’ video essay, which becomes the starting point for a broader narrative about submerged landscapes, post-Soviet infrastructures, and the ghosts of unrealised futuristic promises.
Video essays, archival materials, digital simulations, and post-internet landscapes of ruins create a story about water as a tool of violence, a carrier of memory, and a medium of catastrophe. The exhibition intertwines the hauntology of infrastructure, climate grief, posthuman landscapes, and aesthetics of collapse, examining how war, extraction, and technology shape collective memory and imaginaries of the future. The WRO Archive plays a central role here – not as a neutral storage space for history, but as a living, porous organism of memory, where obsolete media, digital migrations, and decaying technologies function like a post-catastrophic landscape.
The project draws inspiration from the work of J.G. Ballard, particularly his vision of a world in which civilisation does not end suddenly, but slowly slips into a humid, sticky state of transformation.
Curatorial text
Doomflooding
Drowning in the Ruins of Post-Soviet Solarpunk
“In the early morning light a strange mournful beauty hung over the lagoon; the somber green-black fronds of gymnosperms, intruders from a Triassic past, and the half-submerged white buildings of the twentieth century still reflected together in the dark mirror of the water, the two interlocking worlds apparently suspended at some junction in time.”
J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, London, 1962
In Ballard’s novels, the world does not end suddenly. There is no single explosion, no final catastrophe. Instead, reality slowly slips into another state of matter. Cities sink. Concrete absorbs moisture. Infrastructure begins to resemble a ruin long before it actually stops functioning. People live among the remnants of former systems, trying to distinguish memory from hallucination.
It is precisely from this landscape that What We Lost in the Water emerges. The exhibition takes its title from Daria Syvakos’ video essay, which becomes the starting point for a broader reflection on infrastructures of violence, memory, and collapsing futuristic promises. At the centre of the project, Syvakos’ works encounter the WRO Archive – understood not as a stable collection of documents, but as a living organism of memory: a submerged archive of images, technologies, and unrealised visions of the future.
Syvakos’ video essay What We Lost in the Water moves through the hydrological megaprojects of the Soviet Union: dams, irrigation canals, forced displacements, destroyed ecosystems, and industrial landscapes of Ukraine and Central Asia. Water appears here as a political tool – a technology of control, extraction, and the management of life. At the same time, it remains a carrier of memory. It submerges not only land, but also histories, languages, rituals, and local worlds.
In Yellow Prince That Casted Long Shadows, history ceases to function as a linear narrative. Syvakos reveals how hunger, colonial violence, and imperial loops of history return in new forms: as politics of exhaustion, economies of hunger, and the spectrality of violence. The past does not disappear – it leaks through the cracks of infrastructure like toxic humidity.
Syvakos’ works encounter the WRO Archive at a particular historical moment. In an era of climate grief and ecological mourning, the archive can no longer function as a neutral instrument of preservation. It becomes itself a post-catastrophic landscape. Collections of VHS tapes, Betacams, discs, cables, damaged media, and digital migrations increasingly resemble a posthuman terrain rather than a stable repository of knowledge. Technologies of the future age faster than we are able to preserve them.
Post-Soviet techno-futurism – present both in the aesthetics of modernist hydrotechnical projects and in archival visions of media art – returns here as the ghost of an unrealised future. Survival domes, digital simulations, and half-submerged landscapes echo with old promises of technological salvation. Yet instead of utopia, what emerges are collapse aesthetics – landscapes of exhaustion, contamination, and permanent crisis.
In this sense, the exhibition exists somewhere between wet necropolitics and wet ontology. Water is not a symbol of purification or romantic nature here – it becomes a medium of catastrophe. The archive grows humid, porous, and biological. Memory begins to function more like an ecosystem than a database. More like more-than-human memory than ordered history.
This is why Ballard returns here so naturally. In The Drowned World, half-submerged twentieth-century architecture reflects itself in the “dark mirror of the water,” suspended between epochs. In Syvakos’ works, post-Soviet infrastructures remain similarly suspended: neither dead nor alive. They function as afterlives of empire – post-imperial infrastructures that continue to produce violence long after their own collapse.
The exhibition also examines how the internet and digital culture have transformed our experience of catastrophe. Doomscrolling, feeds filled with war, fires, floods, and climate crises produce a new perception of time. Catastrophe ceases to be an event – it becomes an atmosphere. A permanent condition of psychological suspension. “Slow violence” unfolds everywhere at once and never truly ends.
Contemporary reality increasingly operates through the language of simulation, CGI, game engines, and post-internet aesthetics of ruins. These landscapes feel simultaneously real and unreal – something like doomscrolling at three in the morning, when one catastrophe after another begins to merge into a single endless feed. Yet this is not about futuristic spectacle or a Hollywood-style “end of the world.” Rather, it asks: what does memory look like in an age of infrastructural collapse? What remains after the modernist promises of acceleration, progress, and technological control over nature?
In this sense, What We Lost in the Water is not an exhibition about the end of the world. It is more about living inside its slow, sticky disintegration. A space where posthuman hauntology meets eco-necropolitics, where disaster pastoral unfolds within the digital archive, where decolonial thought encounters climate grief, and where infrastructures organising death, exhaustion, and disappearance reveal their material and psychological presence.
Dagmara Domagała
