Stedley Art Foundation presents a new exhibition by Polina Shcherbyna in the White Space program “Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Past.”

The central theme of Polina Shcherbyna’s exhibition is the notion of death, which she reveals not so much through the end of earthly life, physical or emotional loss, but rather as a way of shaping history.

For the artist, death appears as a threshold beyond which it is decided what will remain in memory and what will be pushed into oblivion. In a similar way, the memory of significant events, figures, and symbols of the past can be swept away by the winds of history — and this loss also bears the marks of death.

The exhibition’s title refers to Ilya Kabakov’s essay “Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future”, in which the author reflects on the selectivity of cultural memory and the role of the artist in this process. Shcherbyna expands on this idea: not everyone makes it not only into the future — not everyone is allowed to remain in the past.

The central work of the project is the installation “Paradise Gate”, which the artist interprets as the image of a final point — not only of an individual life, but also of the formation of the context in which we live and in which others will live after us. The nature of these paradise gates, according to the artist, is unknown and changeable.

“Perhaps the entrance to paradise is in fact the exit from hell?” she asks.

In the exhibition, the artist reflects on how memory is formed and who holds the power to determine what remains in history. Through images of emergence and decay, she offers a view of death as a crossroads: between the visible and the lost, between the history we embrace and the one we might have been able to keep.