The Lunar Codex uses digital and analog technology to preserve art, books, music, and more, enclosed in time capsules and launched to the Moon. It is a message-in-a-bottle to the future.

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Curatorial Notes

 

This Gallery showcases a selection of works from Olesya Dzhurnayeva, born in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. In 1989 she moved to Ukraine, living and working in Kyiv. City life and the wonder of the everyday are the subject of her art, particularly her celebrated linocuts, which display a mastery of technique.

Working only in black and white, her compositions rely on cut line density to define a narrative nuance  of shadow, brightness, and reflected light.  These works have been exhibited around the world and honored with numerous prizes, including the 2019 Grand Prix Prix Félix Bracquemond in printmaking at 158th Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris.

In February 2022, she and her daughters fled Kyiv, amidst the devastation of the country. Still in Ukraine, she writes:

"My art is about contemplation, about light... Now this is not possible. I am deprived of my usual tools, place of work, home. But the desire to live and work is stronger. I gathered my thoughts and do what keeps me afloat. A first woodcut in my life, printed with Ukrainian black soil. This is about the window of my hope, about the windows of all the destroyed houses and lives... about the fact that we cannot be broken, we cannot be defeated..."
 

With one piece, and then another, Dzhurnayeva continued her art - with the tools around her, found wood, coarse gouges, soil - despite everything around her, defining through her art a human spirit that is unconquerable.

This is what the Lunar Codex is about, that human spirit which compels us despite everything against us to search for meaning, to survive, to create - to give evidence to the future that we were here.
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