For a Better Day is dedicated to Olga Permiakova's mother, who was diagnosed with dementia. During visits to Kyiv in the early stages of the illness, Permiakova noticed small changes in her mother's behaviour, while their roles slowly reversed and the daughter became the carer. She brought some of her mother's belongings back to her Amsterdam studio and began turning them into still lifes and objects.
The objects speak of more than one kind of loss. Alongside a personality slowly slipping away, they carry the habits of a generation shaped by Soviet scarcity. Towels from the Soviet era are kept unused and still brand new; seen through water-filled jars, their patterns bend and fragment, much as her mother's sense of self is slowly being reshaped. Slivers of soap, too small to use yet impossible to throw away, have been gathered from her bathroom and piled into a single object. Fruit stickers her mother collected on her balcony now cover papier-mâché bananas. Like the good china and the best tablecloth, everything was saved: на чорний день, for a black day, or for a special occasion that never arrived. Now that illness has taken hold, the better day these things were waiting for will probably never come. Through them, the project looks at memory on two levels: one person's fading recollection, and the inherited reflex to hold on to everything.
Soap slivers and push pins, dimensions variable
Papier-mâché and fruit stickers, dimensions variable
Soviet-era towels and water-filled jars, dimensions variable