Guided tour with artist, Talk & Poetry

The evening’s program

At 17.00 – 17.45 Talk and Walk & Talk-guided tour

The artist Runo Lagomarsino and Museum Director and exhibition curator Elisabeth Millqvist meet for a talk and a tour. Lagomarsino participates in the exhibition with two works, both connected to Pablo Picasso and Guernica: Gernikako Argia / The Light of Guernica and The Persistent Action of a Falling Tear.

At 18.00 – 19.00 Poetry reading by Ija Kiva

Ija Kiva reads from her book The New Alphabet of Time. The reading, which takes place in Ukrainian and Swedish, is followed by a conversation in English with Mikael Nydahl from Ellerströms publishing house.

About Ija Kiva

Ija Kiva was born in 1984 in Donetsk, Ukraine. She is a poet and translator. Kiva moved to Kyiv after the beginning of the Russian military intervention in Donbas in 2014 and has been living in Lviv since the full-scale invasion in 2022.

The poems in The New Alphabet of Time were written between 2016 and 2023, depicting an existence where war becomes internalized, occupies dreams, and shatters all hope for the future. With its intense, surreal imagery and a dialogue with history and poets like Paul Celan, Ija Kiva captures the absurdities of war, the dead children in its shadow, and the disintegrating landscape. The book’s afterword is a powerful text on the necessity of poetry in times of terror. “Poetry never lies,” writes Ija Kiva, and the thirst for truth is immense when the boundary between living and merely surviving begins to blur.

The book is part of a series on contemporary Ukrainian poetry, published in collaboration between Ellerströms and Ariel publishers (translated by Mikael Nydahl and Diana Dobrodij). The previous titles in the series are The War Doesn’t Start Tomorrow / Stones and Nails by Julia Musakovska and Daryna Gladun, and We Were Here by Artur Dron. These books depict the invasion and war and their effects as they unfold.

About Runo Lagomarsino

In his artistic practice, Lagomarsino explores themes such as geography, historiography, language, and power.

He has stated that “art has the power to influence the way we see and perceive ourselves. It can tell stories, inspire wonder, and bring about change.”

Runo Lagomarsino was born in 1977, and his works have been exhibited at venues including the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim (New York), Reina Sofía (Madrid), Malmö Konsthall, the São Paulo Biennial, and LACMA (Los Angeles).