The Ethics of Fragility

Exhibition: The Soft Edge of Being — Atticus Art Gallery, 11a Queen Street, Bath, BA1 1HE, United Kingdom.

Dates: 10 November – 23 December 2022.

In the quiet rooms of Atticus Art Gallery, The Soft Edge of Being unfolds as an inquiry into what remains of perception after catastrophe. The exhibition was realised through the support of Eastside Projects, Birmingham — an artist-led organisation that provided curatorial and structural assistance in collaboration with The Ukrainian Cultural Association in the UK — and curated by Sasha Burkhanova-Khabadze, whose practice bridges contemporary British conceptualism with post-Soviet sensitivity.

The works — a single portrait from 2021, a chromogenic photograph, and a constellation of eight faintly drawn faces — were made on either side of rupture: before and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This temporal fault line is not incidental; it structures the exhibition’s entire logic. These images are not about the war, yet they think from within its aftermath — from the condition of attention that follows collective shock. Their silence is not withdrawal. It is a countermeasure to noise, a refusal of spectacle, a slow ethics of care that asserts the possibility of tenderness amid fracture.

Yushchenko’s materials are not neutral; they are forms of thought. His drawings are made in coloured pencil, a medium that resists speed and erasure yet never achieves full saturation. It insists on slowness, on the incremental layering of touch. In Untitled (Face I) (2021), this fragile labour becomes visible as a way of being with — not representing — the human. The child’s face emerges through countless translucent strokes, its presence hovering just above disappearance. The image appears less drawn than accumulated: a residue of attention. Within a visual culture defined by compression and acceleration, the drawing asserts duration as a political gesture. The artist’s hand, unmechanised and vulnerable, becomes an analogue of endurance.

By contrast, The Trace (2022) transforms this intimacy into distance. The work is a large C-type photograph of human skin traversed by a diagonal red mark — an image at once visceral and abstract. The chromogenic process, with its chemical precision and dependence on light, replaces touch with exposure. Here the medium itself becomes a philosophical statement: the photographic surface as a site of translation between pain and memory. The red trace — neither wound nor symbol — marks the moment when endurance becomes visible. The photograph’s clinical clarity does not drain emotion; it holds feeling at the very limit of perception, as though empathy might be distilled into light.

To move from drawing to photography is to move from hand to lens, from embodied presence to mediated reflection. Yet Yushchenko treats these not as oppositions but as complementary modes of care. Both enact a refusal of spectacle: the drawing by withholding, the photograph by clarifying. In the language of Gillian Rose, they occupy “the broken middle” — that precarious interval between knowing and not knowing, between the self and the other, where responsibility persists even when comprehension fails. To attend to these works is to enter that space: to dwell within the fragile duration of looking without mastery.

Echoes (Eight Faces) (2022) completes this meditation by turning singular perception into collective resonance. Eight portraits, drawn in the same restrained register as Untitled (Face I), repeat one another in subtle variation. Each hovers on the threshold of appearance; each re-enacts the gesture of the other. Their near-identity transforms them into a reflection on the instability of presence. They do not depict individuals but a condition of being — the oscillation between appearance and dissolution that defines visibility in the wake of violence. Through repetition, the series generates a rhythm of mourning: an attempt to recall what is already slipping away.

In Yushchenko’s practice, fragility is not a style but a structure of thought. His media — pencil, skin, light — are chosen for their thresholds: materials that register breath, vibration, and trace. Each becomes a means of understanding tenderness not as sentiment but as a form of knowledge. Against the overproduction of images that defines both the post-digital and the wartime condition, these works propose another temporality of seeing — one in which perception is restored to duration and attention becomes an ethical act.

The British context amplifies this reading. Shown in Bath, the works align with a lineage of quiet radicalism within British art. Like Rachel Whiteread’s negative casts or Tacita Dean’s fragile films, they convert absence into substance and time into matter. Yet Yushchenko’s sensibility remains distinctly Ukrainian — shaped by a history of erasure and endurance, by a culture in which tenderness often functions as survival. In this sense, The Soft Edge of Being is both European and exilic: it thinks the condition of fragility from within displacement.

The exhibition concludes without resolution. What endures is not the image but the ethics of looking that it demands. To linger with these works is to encounter fragility as form — not a sign of weakness but a discipline of endurance. In a time when images are weaponised, Yushchenko restores to them their human scale: the quiet capacity to hold, to tremble, to remain.

 Tom Denman, residing in London, is a distinguished freelance art critic whose perceptive articles have featured in eminent publications such as Art Journal, ART PAPERS, ArtReview, Art Monthly, Burlington Contemporary, e-flux, Flash Art, Ocula, and Studio International. He earned his PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading, focusing his research on Caravaggio and the noble-intellectual milieu of seventeenth-century Naples. Presently, his critiques primarily explore the subtleties and emerging trends within contemporary art.