Museum open at 12:00pm
Cinema is closed now
Museum open at 12:00pm
Cinema is closed now
An Evening with Dana Kavelina
FILM PROGRAM ACCOMPANYING THE EXHIBITION THE WOMAN QUESTION 1550–2025
Weinvite you to the final film screening as part of the program accompanying the exhibition “The Women’s Question 1550–2025”.
We will screen Dana Kavelina’s films Letter to a Turtledove and Lemberg Machine.
The screening will be preceded by a lecture by Weronika Zalewska.
We will screen Dana Kavelina’s films Letter to a Turtledove and Lemberg Machine.
The screening will be preceded by a lecture by Weronika Zalewska.
How can one speak about war in a voice that does not belong to generals, war correspondents, or politicians?
Dana Kavelina—a Ukrainian artist working at the intersection of animation, painting, and activism—consistently seeks answers to this question, creating cinema in which trauma is not a subject but a medium: something that can be broken down into frames, translated into a drawing, or filtered through a poem.
The two films presented— Letter to a Turtledove and Lemberg Machine—are works separated by time and geography, yet united by a common method: a perspective from below, from the body, from the victim who refuses to remain silent.
Dana Kavelina—a Ukrainian artist working at the intersection of animation, painting, and activism—consistently seeks answers to this question, creating cinema in which trauma is not a subject but a medium: something that can be broken down into frames, translated into a drawing, or filtered through a poem.
The two films presented— Letter to a Turtledove and Lemberg Machine—are works separated by time and geography, yet united by a common method: a perspective from below, from the body, from the victim who refuses to remain silent.
Letter to a Turtledove, originally conceived as a radio play, is a film-poem about the Donbas after 2014—a radio signal sent toward a woman in the occupied territories. Kavelina weaves together amateur war footage with her own animated sequences and archival material from the 1930s, creating a surreal collage in which horror and tenderness coexist within a single frame.
This is not about the “friend-enemy” paradigm, but rather the lens of intimate violence, in which the position of the victim paradoxically becomes a site of agency.
Lemberg Machine reaches even deeper into history: to the 1941 Lviv pogroms, recounted from the perspective of resurrected victims. Animation functions here as an act of necromancy—a metaphor for restoring memory to bodies that history has tried to erase.
Together, the two films trace a map of violence spanning decades and generations, demonstrating that in Kavelina’s cinema, revival—literal, animated—is always a political gesture: a refusal to forget and an act of care toward those whose voices have been silenced.
This is not about the “friend-enemy” paradigm, but rather the lens of intimate violence, in which the position of the victim paradoxically becomes a site of agency.
Lemberg Machine reaches even deeper into history: to the 1941 Lviv pogroms, recounted from the perspective of resurrected victims. Animation functions here as an act of necromancy—a metaphor for restoring memory to bodies that history has tried to erase.
Together, the two films trace a map of violence spanning decades and generations, demonstrating that in Kavelina’s cinema, revival—literal, animated—is always a political gesture: a refusal to forget and an act of care toward those whose voices have been silenced.
