Whose woods are these? Чиї це ліси? (2025)
New hybrid media exhibition upcoming at PIX FILM Gallery, Toronto.
Opening September 5-25, 2025
8:00 PM at PIX FILM Gallery – 1411 Dufferin Street Unit C, Toronto.
Supported by The Petman Foundation
Whose woods are these? Чиї це ліси? is a cinema installation combining language and landscape to merge an elusive, shifting past with an urgent present.
The project, installed in the window gallery of PIX FILM Toronto, combines original and found film with text in an attempt to grasp the language and country of my ancestors.
In 2022, the news of Ukraine’s valiant defence against Russia’s latest violent invasion hit global headlines. As a third generation Ukrainian in Canada, I was overwhelmed with fury at the world and my own helplessness. In solidarity with Ukraine and in defiance of its cultural erasure, I began to study Ukrainian.
The title – Whose woods are these? Чиї це ліси? – like the rest of the text in the film, is drawn from my language lessons, and evokes both the fairy tales of childhood and the forest terrain now contested along the borders.
The black and white film footage is from Marusia (1938), a tragedy set in rural Ukraine, produced in North America for the Ukrainian diaspora, viewed by my mother as a child in Flin Flon, Manitoba. From this film I borrowed the classic cinema trope of the changing seasons to summon the passage of time and evoke the fiction of memory.
Original imagery of rural Canada, shot through a train window, stands in for a remote land with similar terrain, much as immigration agents showed photographs of the Canadian prairie to entice peasants from Eastern Europe. Pastoral and industrial midlands fly by while a single cloud floats suspended above distant fields. Words and pictures traverse a century and half the globe to meet under the same sky.
Hope Peterson 