Wednesday, May 14th at 8pm EST, ISSUE Project Room and curatorial platform Time Based are pleased to stream a new collaboration between New York-based multi-instrumentalist Eden Girma and Kyiv-based film composer Maryana Klochko. The duo’s new work will be available on ISSUE’s website and Time Based's YouTube channel (4pm EET) as part of ongoing activations of the Distant Pairs Series. Throughout May 2025, ISSUE and Time Based will co-present three digital commissions uniting artists based in Kyiv and New York City. Working through the simultaneity of war and multiple crises, these three pairs engage in a collaborative creation that highlights physical distance - yet reveals a deeply layered interdependence.
Two artists in separate worlds begin an ever-delayed conversation. As the intimate exchange unfolds, what do they realize about these worlds darkly unraveling around them, and the threads of connections invariably laced within the surrounding ruin?
IT FEELS LIKE THE END OF THE WORD is an audiovisual work exploring distance, memory, dissolution, resilience, and dialogue across time. Shot in both Kyiv and New York, the artists’ combined perspectives reveal an ethereal yet surreal and unsettling shared world. Physical distance is dissolved into dreamlike conversation, and between split-screen visuals emerges a dialectic of stark yet ephemeral landscapes, body movement that appears only marginally human, resounding silences, and weighty absence. Through the musical and visual exchange, this piece begins to trace what forces dictate our collective movement and transition amidst a tense reality—shouldering echoes from the past, reaching towards the unseen, illuminating the shadowy and invisible, or stepping into the future.
Eden Girma is a composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumental musician hailing from Madison, WI. Having grown up at the nexus of widely varying and vibrant musical traditions, Eden creates through a variety of audio-visual-technological media—bridging realms such as popular music, improvisatory collaboration, expressionism, and experimental electronics. Through a genre-bending ear and a poetic lyricism, their artistic practice and work not only resonate with individual hearts, but bring people closer together in a spirit of intimacy and empathy.
Maryana Klochko is a music producer, vocalist, and film composer based in Kyiv, Ukraine. In her works, she often engages with the unconscious—through lyrics and vocal parts, she seeks a balance between the real and the fictional. She perceives music as storytelling, finding visual images within compositions that come to life through sound. Trained as an interior designer with an MA from the Lviv Academy of Arts, her background in visual composition deeply informs her musical sensibilities. Her work spans experimental, pop, club, post-apocalyptic folk, and ambient music. As a film composer, Maryana has scored multiple award-winning films, including Stop-Zemlia (2021), A Picture to Remember (2023), and Utopians (2022). Her distinctive approach to film scoring—marked by immersive sonic textures and emotional depth—earned her the Ukrainian Film Academy’s Golden Dzyga Award for Best Original Music Score and Best Song for Stop-Zemlia in 2021.
