“Temple of the three worlds”

An exhibit, “Stone Grave: Reincarnation,” has been opened at the exhibition hall of the Lviv Museum of the History of Religion. The displayed items were delivered to Lviv by the History Museum in Kamiansky, Dnipropetrovsk oblast, as part of cooperation between the two museums (Den wrote about this in No. 110-111, June 23, 2016).

The exhibit shows artworks by Anatolii Furlet, Serhii Laushkin, and Oleksandr Chehorka, members of the National Union of Ukrainian Artists. Each of them worked in his own genre, but what united them was the Stone Grave (“Kamiana Mohyla”) theme. It will be recalled that the Stone Grave (a steppe hill), a natural object that has survived in southern Ukraine, is a temple of sorts that combines three worlds – celestial, terrestrial, and subterranean. The sandstone hill has been playing this role for millennia. These places have been attracting researchers for a long time. Artists do not bypass them today, either, for they are trying to unravel the sacral secrets hidden deep inside the Stone Grave. After visiting it, the artists tried to express the emotions they had experienced there.

“This is an attempt to artistically reconstruct the Stone Grave’s spiritual space by way of special energy-information flows, sort of a reincarnation of ancient signs and symbols in the context of contemporary Ukrainian art,” says Natalia Bulanova, Candidate of Sciences (History), director of the Kamiansky History Museum.