Daria Khozhai is a Ukrainian artist and architect. Through her work she recreates remembered or imagined physical spaces that carry an emotional load. In 'Apartment No. 8' at Kunstenlab, she processes her personal experiences of escaping a violent relationship. Her installation shines a light on the hidden suffering that normally remains obstructed from view.

Daria Khozhai combines artistic, architectural and psychological research in her work. She is interested in spaces with a charged emotional and/or historical load: places where personal or collective trauma has occurred in the form of displacement, violence and physical or emotional pain. She recreates these spaces from memory, both in small scale models or full sized installations, resulting in what she calls “memory-rooms.” Rather than exact reconstructions, her spaces are shaped by the traces of trauma and emotional weight the original spaces carried. She typically uses just one material that has a symbolic significance in context of the space she is recreating. Her models and installations are often built through time-consuming, repetitive handwork: a making process that borders between the obsessive and the ritual.

Her installation at Kunstenlab centers around the subject of domestic and relational violence, using her personal experience to open up a dialogue. In 2024, after seven years, the artist fled a violent relationship with her former fiancé. As part of a therapy program, she began writing down what had happened to her. Those pages filled with personal suffering become the building material for a 1:1 fragmented reconstruction of one of the apartments she shared with her ex. At Kunstenlab she rebuilds the space in meticulous detail, where everything — from the sofa to the walls to the light switches — is made out of the written pages. For the exhibition she also developed an unsettling sound installation in which fragments from the pages recur and seem to haunt the space. Meanwhile, the light falling on the paper installation casts large, menacing shadows on the surrounding walls. Despite the lightness of the material, the weight of the experiences the work addresses is palpable in every element.

Khozhai herself describes the installation as an architecture of trauma and survival. It is as though the room, which throughout that time was the silent witness to the trauma, has stored the story within itself. In this way, the personal crises that usually remain invisible to the outside world are suddenly revealed by the very same structures that keep them hidden from view.

This work by Daria Khozhai is being researched by art historian Anja Novak as part of her research project Holding Grief: Engaging Trauma Through Contemporary Art at the University of Amsterdam. Dr. Novak investigates the strategies artists use to address themes such as trauma and grief in their work, focussing in particular on the way in which they enable a dialogue about these subjects. As part of the research, several artists are being followed during the development of a project, of which Daria Khozhai is the first. On August 29, Anja Novak will give a lecture at Kunstenlab about her research. On the same day Daria Khozhai will give a workshop in which people are invited to make their own scale model of a space where something happened to them.

Opening
The opening of the exhibition Apartment No. 8 will take place on Sunday, July 5, 2026, at 4:00 PM. We warmly invite you to join us.