ARTHUR BONDAR & OKSANA YUSHKO
TOO FAR
RENDSBURG / GERMANY / 2025
"A Bridge Too Far" project explores existing and new interactions, finding out interconnectedness of various elements beyond the simple dichotomy of the complex world. It symbolically addresses ambitious yet essential actions, urging small steps toward broader political and ecological awareness.
The new iteration of "A Bridge Too Far" in Rendsburg, Germany acts as a multidimensional installation, integrating diverse elements —historical, environmental, symbolic, and sensory. Each component is placed across the city and serves as a 'pillar,' both literally and figuratively, highlighting links across time and space. These individual pillars merge into a rhizomatic artistic object, functioning like an ecosystem, simultaneously fragile and resilient.
The Bridge
archival prints, photography, ready-made
The project reappropriates the Rendsburg High Bridge exploring representation, function, and meaning through object, image, and text. The Bridge becomes a site-specific sculpture, turning infrastructure into monument, support into metaphor.
The Bridge’s archival wartime photographs and contemporary typological images echo Bernd & Hilla Becher’s industrial surveys, and document how the bridge has been seen, used, and remembered across collective history and personal narratives.
The different linguistic genders in various languages alter our perception of the bridge. A technical yet poetic description of the cantilever system, articulates how forces are distributed and balanced through counterweight and dependance. This serves as a structural definition and a metaphor, mirroring human relationships, ideological weight and historical responsibility.
A Bolt
public art at Nord-Ostsee-Kanal
A single replaced bolt from the bridge, isolated and displayed under glass like a relic, embodies how the smallest components can determine collective stability, hinting at forgotten yet essential narratives within our shared history. Together, these elements form a conceptual whole that interrogates how meaning is constructed, how systems are held together, and what collapses when a single element fails or is forgotten.
Cargo Ships
2-screen video installation (fragment 13'50'')
Two screens face each other. Two screens, two directions — cargo ships move silently along the Kiel Canal. One moves left to right, the other right to left, like a slow-motion mirror of the world in motion.
Videos of cargo ships passing through the canal from left to right and in the opposite direction. These steel giants carry goods, power and the invisible threads that connect the world. They represent commerce and control, and demonstrate how humans have bent water to their will by carving pathways through land and time.
However, beneath their steady movement lies an underlying question: what do we trade and what do we lose when the world keeps drifting forward like this — silent, heavy and unstoppable?
An Oak Tree
photography
This oak tree, photographed through the seasons, becomes a quiet monument to time, echoing Monet’s Rouen Cathedral in its shifting light and form. Like Tolstoy’s oak in War and Peace, once barren then blooming, it reminds us that what seems lifeless can be reborn. And referencing Michael Craig-Martin’s conceptual oak, it is more than a tree — it is metaphor, memory, and transformation.
In 2025, this very image became the cover of the Zurich-based composer Rio Wolta’s album Technophobia, where it stands as a symbol of resilience against the cold order of a digital world. Through photography, music, and time, the oak reminds us: life moves in cycles, and in each return, there is quiet hope.
Mirror
documentation of performance
Two artists stand facing each other with mirrors in hand, catching the sunlight between them. Through this gesture, they become bridges themselves, silently but powerfully revealing how empathy, communication and love pass through space and time. The mirrored reflections remind us that building bridges is not only a structural or metaphorical act, but also a deeply personal one — light is exchanged, warmth is given and understanding is received. Mirroring each other affirms presence, recognises ourselves in another and reminds us that human connection illuminates even our darkest spaces.
A Cut Tree / 0815
public art
A cut tree stump marked with 08/15, a number meaning "ordinary" in Germany, reveals what lies beneath routine labels: memory, violence, and quiet loss. The phrase originally referred to the heavy machine gun used by the German military during the WWI, the MG 08/15, and it has since evolved into a colloquialism used to describe anything routine or boring.
Its rings hold the forest’s history like a musical score, echoing bird songs and forgotten rhythms of nature, evoking Edison Denisov’s Bird’s Singing. Etched with fading birds in flight, the stump invites us to listen deeply — to what trees remember, to what is silenced, and to the hidden life inside the so-called ordinary.
A Glass Wall
installation, public art
Salvaged glass bricks from historical buildings form a transparent wall that allows light to come through. It is both a barrier and a source of hope. Inside, the photographs of Surzhyk birds carry stories of mixed language, memory and loss. Now standing at this glass border, they serve as anti-war symbols, reminding us that words, like seeds, have the power to divide or bring us together.
ready-made
This book, Aus Deutschlands Vogelwelt — From Germany’s Bird World — is more than a collector’s album of birds tucked into cigarette packs in 1936. It turns nature into something to be gathered, sorted, and kept —an image of beauty slipped into daily life through smoke and habit.
But many of the birds it shows — like the Little Bittern, Lapwing, Eurasian Oystercatcher, and Corn Crake —are now vanishing. Once common in Germany’s skies and fields, their numbers are falling fast, threatened by drained wetlands, silent meadows, and human noise.
This fragile book becomes a witness — not only to the birds, but to the quiet violence of forgetting. It asks us to listen again, before the birds, like the pages, turn to dust.
An Apple Tree
photography
The gentle questioning of our boundaries by an apple tree reveals the complex balance between innovation and intrusion, reminding us of nature's resilience amid our restless attempts to reshape life.
Oma’s Haus
textile, hibiskus, photography
A white tablecloth holds fading spots of hibiscus tea — marks left by cups gathered through travels and migrant journeys. Like a mad tea party from Alice in Wonderland, it speaks of absence, longing, and the surreal disarray of lives, when the main characters change places and spaces and ask unanswerable questions. Standing before it feels like facing a blank page — where the first step, the first spill, carries fear, fragility, and the quiet courage of stepping into the unknown.
Loop
video installation (fragment 5'41'')
The railway loop in Rendsburg, Germany, serves as a quiet reminder that sometimes we must turn all the way around in order to move forward. Seeing the Rendsburg High Bridge whenever we enter or leave the city reminds us that in life, as in travel, paths often twist and turn before taking us to new destinations.
A Map
object
Created from direct prints of old metal plates found in the Rendsburg Museum, marked with geotags and gentle artistic interventions, this map transforms from a passive representation into an active landscape. It holds traces of each element: the High Bridge, the replaced bolt, the cut tree coded 0815, the oak through seasons, the Surzhyk birds, the cargo ships, the glass wall glowing with fragile light and other ‘pillars’ interconnected in the installation.
Maps, like models or language, are never complete — they reveal and conceal, emphasize and erase. This one, too, chooses its path: it records moments, gestures, coordinates of loss and care. In doing so, it echoes the idea that the map becomes the territory — not by replacing reality, but by weaving together its fragments into a shared space of reflection.
Here, the map becomes a stage where bridges are built, not only across rivers but between stories, species, times, and selves. It invites the viewer to navigate a world in this transformation — to walk slowly, to notice what is missing, and to imagine what might still be restored.
Nordkolleg: 54°17'22.1"N 9°38'45.2"E
Forest: 54°17'19.8"N 9°38'45.9"E
Oak tree: 54°17'23.3"N 9°38'33.0"E
Rendsburg Museum: 54°18'04.3"N 9°39'41.6"E
Surzhyk birds: 54°18'20.6"N 9°39'25.0"E
Rensburg High Bridge: 54°17'38.5"N 9°40'57.5"E
Ost Sea Kanal: 54°17'28.4"N 9°39'53.2"E
ARTHUR BONDAR & OKSANA YUSHKO
TBILISI / GEORGIA / 2023
Encouraging ability to see things from multiple perspectives, the project metaphorically indicates a step that is too ambitious or overreaching in a time of war. The project calls to actions to start a journey of a thousand miles beginning with a single step, bringing attention to the important issues, raises questions about current political and ecological thinking.
Building bridges we unveil and visualize the hidden connections, bringing to the light need of support, span and foundation.
The Bridge
Borders divide people from reality and each other, multiplying people’s fears and uncertainties. A glass, a protective screen between two realities prevents interaction and makes impossible to listen to each other.
‘Mind the gap’ became an essential warning. Bridging this gap the artists reveal connections which exist between separated things, reflecting on existing relationships, real or fake interactions, ‘making kin in a world that rips us apart from each other’.
Cover
“Stupefied by prayers, sermons, exhortations, by processions, pictures, and newspapers, the cannon's flash, hundreds of thousands of men, uniformly dresses, carrying divers deadly weapons, leaving their parents, wives, children, with hearts of agony, but with artificial sprightliness, go where they, risking their own lives, will commit the most dreadful act of killing men whom they do not know and who have done them no harm.”
Leo Tolstoy / "Bethink yourselves!"
The Advocate of Peace Journal, September 1904, Vol. 66, pp. 164-176
Today, many Russian cultural figures, be they writers or artists, are faced with the question of how to talk about war when even the word "war" has become taboo? Can an artist even talk about it as long as war continues and people die? Everyone answers these questions in his own way. And at this time, in the light of the flaring war, we have to hide cultural treasures in the darkness of underground shelters, waiting for the time when we can speak of peace again.
The Carpet
Where is your carpet, there is your home says a nomadic proverb, transforming unknown territory into familiar landscape, stitching the broken memories, repairing the holes.
The artist builds a ‘temporary shelter’ for those who are in need, hospitably inviting a viewer to look through a visual diary of the last year or an artist’s kitchen. This backdoor also brings the audience to the unknown stitch studies of the times, when pseudo national art and culture was absolutely empty of any content. The backside of the found herbarium in an abandoned school reveals much more about the past than such artificially maid history. The thread draws the stories associated with specific places, people and time. The embroidery, the enigmatic stitches transform into wire figures and a suprematist grammar, forming a new vocabulary and presenting multidimensional narratives.
The Victory Column
The Column of Victory made from old parquet brings to the light the human tragedy of war. The use of old wood refers to the price of any victory which human pay in times of crises.
The Bird’s Nest
The current ecological crises and a number of environmental problems have roots in relationships between human and nature, and in the ways how we, humans, as a species, regard the natural world.
Learning from nature we construct our reality often brutally violating it. A famous proclamation from the 1930 by Ivan Michurin ‘we cannot wait for kindnesses from nature; our task is to wrest them from her,’ strongly influenced this view. An empty bird’s nest, artificial vessels point attention to such brutal engineering projects and attitude.The found objects becomes a form of a cognitive play that stimulates the human mind and invite to find a personal associations.
Interrelationships between different actors, cross-pollination of ideas and thoughts, collaboration across different boundaries and limitations are the topics of our research.
The project outlines the bridges between war and peace then and now, bringing to the light need of support and care, standing with love and humanity.
