A book about endeavoring to find one’s place in a violent wartime history, mediating between objectivity, scholarly distance, and affective engagement.

“War enters through the eyes.” This observation by Goya finds expression in his famous series The Disasters of War. Today, we might add that while images carry suffering, they also desensitize us to it. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, an unprecedented volume of images depicting the suffering of others has been produced. However, what is it that we actually see? What do we fail to see? Does our gaze preserve the impact, or are we engaging in a form of pornography, looking perversely into a place where we should not peek? As we absorb these images, we oscillate between different perspectives: at once witnesses to crime, spectators of a media spectacle, and accidental bystanders.

Being a Guest in a Catastrophe is an English translation of Tomasz Szerszen’s anthropological essay on looking at images of the war in Ukraine. The text attempts to narrate the war through its visuality and through art, questioning what it means to look, to flee, to suffer, to survive, to hate, to document, to transcend, to decolonize, and to write. At the same time, this is also a book about Kharkiv’s “Slovo” Building, which—like a lens—reflects the fate of Ukrainian culture over the last century.