Olha Matso

Olha Matso has performed at poetry readings and spoken word events at the Winding Stair Bookshop and Vicar St. (as part of the Red Cross/Ukrainian Action Ireland event in 2022) and others throughout Ireland. 

She’s created poetry videos on her youtube channel and was recently commissioned by artist Varvara Shavrova for a poetry reading at the launching of an installation at the Photo Museum Ireland. Olha is studying performing arts, acting for stage and screen, and she often blends poetry with movement, dance and performance.

The ‘Executed Renaissance’, as Olha explains, was an artistic movement violently repressed by the Stalinist regime. These Ukrainian poets, writers, and artists of the 1920s and early 1930s founded many literary organisations, and created art as they put it: "on the brink of the possible". Hundreds of them were deported, imprisoned or shot.

'Absurdity - and magical realism - it's more realistic than real life. It comes from the real life. People just live their lives in this domestic style, they forget about that magic and poetry. It comes to us to remind that ok, you live in this world, in a real world, but it's a magical world.'

Follow her @olhamatso and watch her poetry videos.