“I’d worked with Kaupo on an earlier exhibition of ‘What Would You Take?’ in December 2018, so when he called me in the summer of 2022 and suggested we do another version focused on the Ukrainian crisis, I immediately agreed. Together with the translator and fixer, Ulyana Osovska, and the documentary film-maker, Heilika Pikkov, we set out from Tallinn on 12 December in Kaupo’s car. He drove us safely through heavy snow blizzards to Riga, then to Vilnius, then all the way through Poland to the border town of Przemysl, stopping at each location to meet the people who had agreed to be part of this exhibition. We left the car at Przemysl and travelled by train from there to Lviv, and then on from Lviv by the night train to Kyiv, to meet those in the exhibition who had been internally displaced.

We were lucky, there were no air raid sirens in these beautiful cities while we were there. All I had to worry about was the treacherous icy cobblestones. I spent most of the time looking at my feet, praying that my new winter boots would keep me upright and spare our Ukrainian hosts the job of taking me to hospital with a broken leg. I left Kyiv on 22 December and was in Poland the following morning. On 24 December, I was home, but in Kyiv the air sirens wailed as Putin’s Christmas present of renewed attacks on Ukrainian targets was delivered."