Exhibition by documentary photographer Ludwig Nikulski
In the third week of the war, a Polish border guard tells me that everything has changed. In the same town, a hotelier disagrees and says that nothing has changed. Since February 2022, Ukraine's western external border has separated Europe from the war. In the border regions, it is more present than ever before, but at the same time it is so far away that you rarely notice it. "Under the Palms" explores the contradiction between the presence and absence of war and discovers a confusion between everyday life and a state of emergency. Since the beginning of the war, I have been following the Ukrainian border with a large-format camera through Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, the Republic of Moldova and Transnistria. Photographs and prose texts tell of the war in a multi-layered way and open up perspectives that are barely visible in the reporting. In recent months, the war has increasingly crossed the border. Drones have exploded in European territory in Moldova and Romania, Polish airspace has been violated several times, acts of sabotage and espionage are on the rise. What seemed distant for a long time is getting closer, sometimes silently, sometimes with the reverberation of an explosion. It is precisely in these border regions that we can see how fragile the supposed distance to the war has become.
