How can one truly comprehend another person’s experience without having lived through it? How does one articulate the ineffable, where language itself falters? This question, explored by Edith Stein, became central to my practice with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. At that time, I was creating wartime posters to communicate the Ukrainian people’s struggle against occupation to the West. Yet, Ukrainian culture and history remain largely unknown in Western Europe. Without recognition of commonalities or an understanding of another’s subjectivity—whether that of an individual or, in this case, an entire nation—genuine empathy remains elusive. My fundamental task, therefore, is to narrate the Ukrainian experience through art, distilling real figures into archetypes and recognizable visual tropes intrinsic to European cultural memory.The project Arcana Belli presents an attempt to interpret Ukraine and my personal experience of war through the imagery of the Rider-Waite Tarot, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. To me, Tarot is first and foremost a phenomenon of Western European culture, an accumulation of diverse cultural elements—religion, archetypes, mythology, folklore, and social structures. In a sense, it is European civilization itself, distilled into a symbolic system of 78 images.The structured and recognizable visual language of Tarot allows for a fixed iconography that can be read universally. In Arcana Belli, I engage this structure, interweaving the realities of contemporary Ukraine with traditional Ukrainian iconography, folklore, direct citations from Ukrainian art and poetry. These elements coexist with references to and allusions from Western European cultural heritage, creating a dialogue between the local and the global.A key referential framework for this project is Francisco Goya’s Los desastres de la guerra cycle. In its expressive depictions of the suffering of the Spanish people at the beginning of the 19th century, I find parallels with Ukraine’s present. As Ernst Cassirer stated, “Man lives in a symbolic universe.” What makes Goya’s cycle particularly significant to me is that it does not merely document brutal realities but instead conveys their underlying symbolic essence—an approach that also defines Ukrainian sacred art. Consequently, in Arcana Belli, the realities of war and the everyday life of Ukrainians are imbued with symbolic meaning.The exhibition consists of 78 posters, each capturing different aspects of Ukrainian life since 2014. Each work is accompanied by a quotation, primarily from Ukrainian and Western European literary texts, highlighting the metaphorical essence of the piece and reinforcing the interplay between textual and visual dimensions of memory and identity.The deck consists of both Major and Minor Arcana, totaling 78 cards. The set includes a collection of handwritten epigraphs for each card.#NEIVANMADE