Where Memories Live

Where Memories Live, is a two-artist exhibition featuring new work by two Ukrainian immigrant artists, Jennifer Anoruie and Kateryna Kostelna—whose practices navigate memory, displacement, and the fragile act of rebuilding belonging. Through paintings and symbolic assemblages, the exhibition reflects on the creation of an “inner home” — a space shaped not by geography, but by lived experience, cultural inheritance, and the small rituals that tether us to ourselves.

Kateryna Kostelna’s practice centres on domestic objects, particularly those found in the kitchen. Furniture, food, dishes, and daily tools become portals into rituals formed in times of scarcity or fear — habits created to maintain a sense of control. Her imagery is vivid and recurring: lavishly set tables, religious icons, ornate carpets. These are not only symbols of familial warmth; they also hold inherited anxiety. A persistent question echoes through her work: Could this ever happen again? When the fears of her childhood re-emerged as lived reality, she turned to painting, translating personal history into a visual memory-scape.

Jennifer Anoruie’s autobiographical paintings centre on intimate gestures and partially seen figures—braided hair adorned with a single flower, hands holding a blade of grass. Rendered in muted, earthy tones, her images feel like memories recalled in fragments. Through these quiet symbols and close observations, she explores identity, belonging, and the subtle rituals that carry personal and cultural histories into new places.

Together, the artists — each from different regions of Ukraine, brought together by chance in Vancouver — illuminate the emotional terrain of displacement. Where Memories Live offers not only reflections on loss and longing, but a clear testament to resilience: how, even in upheaval, we locate beauty, create meaning, and build new forms of home.