"Friendly Tennis" is a project that touches on the idea of permission to rest during wartime. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, when my mother, my two sisters, and I left Ukraine, my father started hosting Sunday lunches in Odesa—gathering close friends and relatives for meals, conversations, film screenings, and tennis matches. These meetings became a ritual, a source of support, and a way to sustain each other through the war’s everyday realities (daily shelling, power outages, night air alarms.

Being physically distant in Berlin, I experience these gatherings through a kind of “portal”—videos shared in our Viber group, named "Friendly Tennis". I often pause them, studying the details, taking screenshots, and archiving these fleeting moments for myself. Some of these screenshots became the foundation of this work, transferred onto juice cartons—objects that are always present at our Sunday table.

As I painted, I realized how the glossy surface of the cartons, their reflections, and their very shape gave the images a quiet, almost sacred presence. These coincidences—where material and meaning unexpectedly align—are essential to my practice.

The very first presentation was organized exclusively for the members of the Friendly Tennis group, and it will undoubtedly have a continuation. At the opening, I shared these words: “This exhibition is for you and about you. I am merely a mirror reflecting you to yourselves.”

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