1864
Robin Kane
Artwork Description:
Through still and moving image, this series reflects on the Circassian Genocide and forced exile of the 1860s, when the Russian Empire massacred and displaced the majority of the Circassian (Adyghe) population from their homeland in the North Caucasus. Hundreds of thousands were killed, expelled, or died during deportation across the Black Sea, which became both witness and grave. Today, most Circassians remain scattered across a global diaspora, separated from a homeland now divided between southern Russia, near present-day Georgia and Ukraine. The work approaches this history not as a closed historical event, but as an ongoing psychological and cultural condition carried across generations. Bodies, landscapes, and gestures become carriers of inherited memory -holding traces of grief, rupture, survival, and the fragile persistence of identity after displacement. Rather than reconstructing violence directly, the series explores what remains after exile: silence, repetition, longing, and the enduring hope of cultural continuity and return. Paths recur without resolution. Landscapes function less as settings than as memory itself - spaces shaped by absence, endurance, and the tension between disappearance and survival. Through ritual, stillness, repetition, and motion, the works become both memorial and continuation: a love letter to a nation scattered by history, yet still carrying the hope of remembrance, cultural survival, and one day rebuilding connection to its ancestral land.
Project Collaborators:
Robin Kane (@ctlr_faces) Music - Robin kane, Circassian Folk music.
