Fault Lines of Speech: Ruins Collected from a Sentence

By Lisa Knoll

11/2/2023

Exhibition Details:
Artist: Oleksandra Nikitina
Venue: Atticus Art Gallery, Bath, UK
Dates: 9 February – 14 April 2023
Curated by: Thomas Bloor
In partnership with: The Ukrainian Institute London, Architects for Peace, and ArtAid Ukraine / Eastside Projects Birmingham

Image © Atticus Arts Gallery

What remains of language when the buildings that once held it are gone?

In her evocative new exhibition Fault Lines of Speech: Ruins Collected from a Sentence, Ukrainian artist Oleksandra Nikitina invites us into the aftermath of disrupted speech. Installed across the galleries of Atticus Art Gallery in Bath, the exhibition features spatial compositions formed from fragments of architectural material—gathered, salvaged, and reassembled from cities impacted by conflict.

These remains—some scorched, others fractured—are not memorial objects. They do not recount events. Instead, they materialise a syntax of rupture. Elements are suspended, aligned, or balanced not to imitate buildings, but to render visible the psychological and political disorientation that follows their collapse. What results is a lexicon of form: a grammar constructed from what has been broken.

Rather than mourn through monumentality, Nikitina constructs an architecture of language itself—tentative, fractured, and unresolved. Visitors move through a zone where institutional speech—once housed in schools, libraries, theatres—has been scattered. What emerges is not an elegy, but a record of structural hesitation: language trying, and failing, to resume.

Subtle traces of contested geography, erased memory, and silent administration are present throughout. One topographic relief—unlabelled, spare—quietly asserts a presence that cannot be erased. Its politics are not declared. They are embedded in form, in structure, in the act of remaining.

With Fault Lines of Speech, Nikitina does not narrate war. She reveals its linguistic residue—the silences that remain when language is unmoored from place.

For further details, press materials, or public programmes, please contact:
info@atticusgallery.co.uk | www.atticusgallery.co.uk