Venue: Jam Factory Art Center, Auditorium, 124 Bohdana Khmelnytskoho Street, Lviv
As part of The Chalk Circle, the public program of the Stammering Circle exhibition, curated by Marta Kuzma, this conversation brings together artist Julie Poly and curator, writer, and Dean of the Academy of Fine Art at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Antonio Cataldo, to reflect on Poly’s long-term photographic engagement with the Ukrainian national railway system, Ukrzaliznytsia, and its transformation in times of war.
Between 2017 and 2020, shortly after graduating from the Kharkiv State Academy of Railway Transport and working as a train conductor, Julie Poly began producing her Ukrzaliznytsia photo series. Her images captured an atmosphere of intimacy and ambiguity aboard overnight trains—spaces where privacy was blurred, and where boundaries between bodies and identities dissolved under dim fluorescent lighting. The project was first exhibitedinside Kyiv Central Railway Station in 2018 and later shown in expanded form at Fotogalleriet in Oslo in 2023 under the title 4:59, referencing the minute before the full-scale Russian invasion on February 24, 2022.
For The Stammering Circle, Poly returns to the railways—this time in early 2025, amidst a war that has redrawn the political, geographical, and psychic landscapes of Ukraine. Her new work documents Ukrzaliznytsia’s metamorphosis from a national transit system into a critical infrastructure of evacuation, displacement, medical transport, and survival. Poly’s imagery moves between the mournful and the absurd, shaped by contingency, collective trauma, and fleeting hope.
Julie Poly (b. Stakhanov, Ukraine) is a Ukrainian artist currently based in Berlin. Before the full-scale invasion, she lived and worked in Kyiv. Trained in Kharkiv, her artistic roots lie in the informal circles of the Kharkiv School of Photography. Poly’s practice merges documentary and staged photography to explore Ukrainian everyday life through themes of eroticism, fashion, and shifting cultural codes. Her work is inspired by the trivial and the intimate—by the stories of friends, strangers, and her own lived experiences. Her projects often return to their sites of origin, such as train stations or arcade halls, reactivating those spaces through installation and image. In 2021, she founded Hrishnytsia, an art magazine dedicated to eroticism and its representations in contemporary Ukrainian art.
Antonio Cataldo is a curator and writer based in Oslo. As of August 2024, he serves as Dean of the Academy of Fine Art at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, following six years as Artistic Director of Fotogalleriet, Scandinavia’s oldest kunsthalle dedicated to photography. He has held roles at the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), La Biennale di Venezia (co-curating the Nordic Pavilion in 2015), and Iuav University of Venice. He previously worked with Julie Poly on her solo exhibition 4:59 at Fotogalleriet in 2023.
The conversation will be held in English, with simultaneous translation available on site.