Series “Baby Pacifiers That Were Never Used”

The series of transparent pacifiers emerges as an archive of an absent childhood, as materialized traces of care that never came to be. They are casts of real pacifiers, purchased by the artist and her beloved before the birth of their daughter, yet left behind in an apartment on the 21st floor that they were forced to abandon during the war. These objects never fulfilled their function, never preserved the DNA of new life. They became symbols of interrupted continuity, of displacement repeated through four generations.

The transparent forms of the pacifiers contain either flowers or bullets. The flowers are a memory of life that weaves itself even into the experience of loss. The bullets embody the impossibility of speaking, swallowing, or forgetting; they become a lump in the throat that blocks both voice and body, forcing one to flee.

The pacifiers are both a mirage of an archive of care and its very undoing. They are the ghosts of objects meant to mark the beginning of new life, yet turned into witnesses of war and exile. They record invisible pain — not only personal, but collective — the experience of parenthood in a country where a child’s future is marked by anxiety, instability, and the memory of violence.

This work speaks of the vulnerability and incompleteness of life in exile: of the attempt to preserve care in a world where it is always lacking, and where even the child’s symbol of comfort becomes a bearer of trauma.