Faktura 10 presents The Stammering Circle, an exhibition that opens in Lviv at the Jam Factory Art Center on June 21, 2025.
The Stammering Circle, a distributed exhibition on view at locations throughout Lviv, addresses disruption as dysfluency—a “stammering” that makes room for the pause essential to the exhibition of art in the context of war. A noisy business, war is voluminous, invasive, and serially destructive. It intercepts the continuum of time, breaks our understanding of cause and effect, violently occupies the everyday, and challenges the basic tenets of existence.
What constitutes art in times of rupture? How is it possible to find refuge from war’s perpetual state of contingency to make room for creative reflection? What are the forms and expressions—beyond mourning, loss, and requiem—that seize on instability to make a generative space to create resonantly? The Stammering Circle, curated by Marta Kuzma, draws inspiration from the writings of Czernowitz-born Paul Celan to respond to these questions. The poet, who in the aftermath of the tragedy and trauma of World War II emphasized art’s need to roam in an “art-less, art-free manner,” enabling alternative routes of lived experience. Grappling with a way to position art following destruction and desecration, Celan adapted his own approach to form, content, texture, and sound to conceive a postwar composition interconnected with a darkness acknowledged by all. He drafted a manifesto for art that revolved around the search for a poetic space and language that is immaterial “yet terrestrial, as something circular that returns to itself across both poles while—ultimately finding … a meridian.” In this sense, the stammering serves as the resounding passage of rhythms and repetitions charting a new route, as one previously untaken.
The Stammering Circle encompasses the visual, the auditory, the performative, and the dialogic. The project embraces testimony, historical material, archival documentation, and myriad discussions that acknowledge the lived experience of war as posited within art production. At the same time, it reflects on the experience of those who have left, expatriated, or exiled themselves to constitute — as Celan writes in “The Meridian”— a relentless battle with placelessness.
The Stammering Circle is a project of Faktura 10, curated by Marta Kuzma, Chief Curator and Artistic Director. The foundational sites of The Stammering Circle exhibition are the Jam Factory Art Center, Dim42, and the Machine Hall of Lviv Polytechnic National University.
The Chalk Circle
Public programming
The exhibition title, a conjoining of words that draws from concepts brought forth by Paul Celan, wrestles with ideas around truth, justice, and social responsibility as threads of Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
Consequently, the umbrella of discursive public programs held parallel to the exhibition borrows directly from the latter to frame projects by artists, cultural producers, thinkers, philosophers, architects, musicians, and composers who have responded to the threads brought forth by The Stammering Circle. The Chalk Circle is manifested in various locations throughout Lviv and Kyiv, including at Jam Factory Art Center, the Lviv Polytechnic National University, the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Home of Sound (Dim Zvuku), and others.
Taking place throughout the opening week of the exhibition from June 20–June 28, and in August 2025, the full schedule will be announced in June on faktura10.org and jamfactory.ua.
About Faktura 10
Faktura 10 is a core initiative of RIBBON International and is a multimodal program that supports a common basis for creative life and cultural discourses in Ukraine. Faktura 10 focuses on artist practices evolving within the immediacies of the war and its aftermath. It comprises ten events ranging from exhibitions, performances, and plays to screenings, research projects, and discussions, all of which will be held in 2025 within Ukraine, as well as within communities and cities of solidarity internationally.
Marta Kuzma serves as the Artistic Director and Chief Curator of Faktura 10.
Faktura 10 Team
Chief Curator and Artistic Director: Marta Kuzma
International Project Director: Léa Richard-Nagle
Exhibition Designer: Erwin de Muer
Curatorial Research Associate: Daria Anosova
Producers/Ukraine: Anastasiya Zatula and Ivan Levchenko
Senior Research Associate: Willis Kingery
Publications Editor: Pablo Lafuente
About RIBBON
RIBBON is a not-for-profit platform supporting historic and contemporary Ukrainian arts and culture in the form of exhibitions, artist commissions, public programs and grants.
RIBBON runs through Ukraine by way of its railway system.
RIBBON aims to provide support to the endangered legacies of Ukraine’s cultural and artistic heritage, as well as to artists, cultural producers, contemporary culture and institutions throughout Ukraine in their fight for cultural autonomy.
Jam Factory Art Center Team
Program and Executive Director: Bozhena Pelenska
Operations and Executive Director: Tetiana Fedoruk
Visual Arts Project Manager: Mariia Buria
Assistance: Vlada Novosad
Operations Manager: Levko Pidzharyi
Installation: 7CI Group, Home Workshop, Euroenergo, Pro-sys Rental, Andriy Mazurenko, Dmytro Lyashko, Roman Barylyak, Yuriy Shtayda, Metamuseum
Event Manager: Taya Mamchak
Communications: Lesia Dunets, Marta Klub
Receptionists: Anastasiia Vasylenko, Nadiia Saraieva, Oleksandra Tesliuk
Administrative Manager: Anastasiia Mashkevych
Financial Support: Natalia Terletska, Olga Protsaylo
Art Mediators: Sia Kit, Olia Shul, Vlada Novosad, Kateryna Pokora, Khrystyna Savitska, Kateryna Loginova
Other Locations of The Stammering Circle
Dim42
Lviv Polytechnic National University