The sky, once a symbol of silence and infinity, is now turning into a battlefield where drones, satellites, and technological networks shape a new reality. Alongside the external landscape, the inner psychological landscape also shifts. Fears, doubts, and somatic borders become a red line one must dare to cross in order to move forward.

In a time marked by war, fragmentation, distrust, and geopolitical disorientation, Scarlet Horizon takes shape at the fault lines of a world undergoing profound rupture. Rooted in the ongoing war in Ukraine and the shifting architecture of global security, the exhibition reflects a wider erosion of political structures and shared truths. For centuries, the sky has operated as a cultural and philosophical symbol of transcendence, permanence, and orientation. Yet the twenty-first century has destabilized this symbolic register more radically than ever before.

The sky, once a source of metaphysical reassurance, has become a militarized domain: a terrain of surveillance, disintegration, and existential risk. Contemporary warfare unfolds across this vertical expanse in the visible choreography of drones, laser tracers, intercepted rockets, and the lingering glow of airstrikes.

Achille Mbembe’s observation that “war is no longer confined to battlefields; it now permeates the everyday” finds acute resonance in Ukraine, where aerial violence punctuates ordinary life daily. The war’s vertical dimension is inscribed not only in infrastructures of destruction, but also in the affective and psychic landscapes of those who live beneath these skies. Thus, the sky, operates simultaneously as a theatre of aggression and a register of collective vulnerability.

And yet, a paradox persists – as in the times of geopolitical disorientation and rapid changes of the ground, people seek support in something more eternal, such as the dark sky with constellations, which resembles the unconscious with flashes of insight. Constellations such as Ursa Major and Cassiopeia remain stable referents across millennia, offering a counterpoint to the volatility of terrestrial events. This duality reveals the sky as both a universal common and a contested space—borderless and shared, yet weaponized and appropriated.

Peter Sloterdijk, in his Spheres trilogy and in Terror from the Air, dismantles the illusion that atmosphere is a neutral given. Air—our most basic condition of life—has become a site of politics and design, inseparable from technologies of control, ecological collapse, and histories of terror. From chemical warfare in the First World War to Nazi gas chambers, from industrial pollution to climate engineering, the very element of breath has been transformed into an arena of existential risk. Breathing is no longer guaranteed safety; the atmosphere itself can be weaponized.

The environment’s suitability for breathing feels threatened —the inability to breathe due to anxiety during the air raid alarm, or hiding from danger from the sky in stuffy rooms underground, or breathlessness when FPV drones approach in an open environment where there seems to be plenty of air, yet constantly feels suffocating — a tension linked to the perception of physical danger.

In this sense, Scarlet Horizon functions not only as a metaphor for the spectacle of war, but also as an index of systemic fragility; a collapse of trust in the very air that sustains us. For refugees and migrants, this fragility becomes viscerally tangible. The “air of home”—its language, smells, climate, and voices—can vanish in an instant, leaving a sensation of suffocation or emptiness. Life is then lived within transitory atmospheres: camps, shelters, transit zones, trains, and boats. These fragile capsules echo Sloterdijk’s “foam structures”—plural, temporary, and precarious spheres of coexistence. Equally, the loss of ground accompanies displacement, as individuals must navigate new environments and social bubbles in search of stability and belonging.

The desire to control everything from above — assuming a godlike gaze, attempting to overcome one’s own ‘blindness’ to a world far greater than the human — and the deployment of ever-new technologies toward this end, paradoxically, produces the opposite of knowledge; a decline in trust and the creation of an environment that threatens life itself. It also underscores the urgent need to move beyond consumerist attitudes toward the environment, recognizing it not as a passive backdrop but as a vital, shared condition of our existence.

The exhibition situates the sky within a broader “atmospheric politics.” Whoever controls the air controls life. From aerial bombardments and drone surveillance to the toxic atmospheres of xenophobia or the sealed ecologies of refugee camps. Thoughts are tangled in the web of FPV drones wires hanging from trees and covering fields like a new, barbaric spider web. When a thin mesh arches above the road, forming an improvised tunnel in the air — a fragile shield against danger, it serves as a stark reminder of how exposed life remains under ever-evolving technologies of destruction. As Judith Butler reminds us, “vulnerability is a mode of relationality.” Scarlet Horizon mobilizes vulnerability not as a condition of weakness, but as an ethic of interdependence. It proposes the sky as a fragile commons, once endangered and sustaining. Within this framework, art becomes a medium of resistance and re-imagination, capable of cultivating new modes of attention and coherence amid fragmentation and disinformation.

In dialogue with Sloterdijk, the exhibition insists that atmosphere, once imagined as the most natural and secure of conditions, is the most precarious sphere of human existence. By confronting the sky as both metaphor and material, as both commons and battlefield, Scarlet Horizon asks:

How can the sky be apprehended under conditions of collapse and systemic fragility? What forms of coherence are possible in a world structured by fragmentation and disintegration? How might artistic practice intervene as a counterforce—exposing atmospheres of terror while creating spheres of breath and solidarity?

The struggle is internal. Its impact transforms not only the visible environment but the psychological and somatic one—shifting how the body registers danger, how the mind organizes reality, and how the future can be envisioned at all. The scarlet horizon emerges as a threshold, compelling a confrontation with one’s own limits, fears, and the fragments of an eroding order. Once this threshold appears, it demands engagement; avoidance becomes impossible.

The scarlet horizon is a cut against the sharpness of reality — a wound that exposes, with uncompromising candor, the flesh, the innards, inviting a direct, tactile encounter.

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With:
The Ambrozia Project (Igor Kanivets & Margarita Sherstiuk), Apl315, Norman Behrendt, Yulia Beliaeva, Anatoliy Belov, Nazar Bilyk, David Chichkan (1986-2025), Sasha Dolgyi, Ossian Fraser, Sofia Holubeva, Fabian Knecht, Tetiana Malinovska, Maria Matiashova & Dima Tolkachov, Roman Mykhailov, Oleksandr Nasanchuk, Masha Pryven, Vitalii Shupliak, Yuriy Sivirin, Tamara Turliun, Artem Volokitin, Vova Vorotniov, Oleksii Zolotar

Curated by Daria Prydybailo

Temporarily Displaced Foundation

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KYIV – BERLIN
Kyiv and Berlin—just a two-hour flight apart before 2022—were deeply and easily intertwined through underground scenes, artistic communities, and intellectual networks. Yet their connection runs far deeper: in the 1920s, Berlin became a key centre of the Ukrainian cultural diaspora, home to Alexander Archipenko’s School of Sculpture and Painting and to Olexandr Dovzhenko, who served here in a diplomatic role before becoming one of the century’s defining film directors. In the 2020s many Ukrainian artists have also made Berlin their home, adding new perspectives to its vibrant international scene, at the same time staging connected to Kyiv. Today, as borders tighten and fear-driven fragmentation reshapes Europe, the Kyiv–Berlin axis remains a vital cultural route. Its continuity is sustained not by geography but by resilient human and artistic ties—artists, curators, and thinkers who maintain translocal networks that resist isolation and political constraints. Through exhibitions, collaborations, and shared practices, both cities hold a vivid joint presence within the European cultural landscape. Many artists in Scarlet Horizon embody this exchange, affirming a cultural continuity that persists even in times of rupture.

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Salon am Moritzplatz
Oranienstraße 58
Berlin, 10969