іn collaboration with Piotr ARMIANOVSKI, Alexander KROLIKOWSKI, Anatol STEPANENKO,
Texty.org.ua (an independent media by Anatoliy BONDARENKO and Roman KULCHYNSKY),
Olexii KOVALENKO, Mykhailo ZHURBA, Lyuba YAKIMCHUK, Vitaly CHERNETSKY, Dzvinka MATIYASH
I call myself an artist. To a great extent my artistic attention is focused on the vegetable world. For me, this is also a study of the plants’ behavior, which differs depending on their origin. There are certain non-native plants that dominate native species and scientists call them invasive one. However, plants do not kill each other in an instant; nor do they escape in case of danger. This is why they seem to me incomprehensible beings against the background of the continuous history of human wars.
While the full-scale invasion that launched on February 24, 2022, Russian tanks came within five kilometers of my village, I wrote on my workshop door a message to the world: «Follow the example of plants: they are pacifists as far as it is possible on our planet».
In April, the Kyiv region was liberated from Russian troops and I was able to resume my artistic practice.
INVASIONS is my first big-scale work after February 2022, combining AR film, text with illustrations, media studies, objects and herbariums that I collected in Kansas in the USA and in Muzychi village in Ukraine. The desire to shoot on camera in 360° format arised from the understanding that Ukraine appears different in every centimeter of reality during the wartime: ruins on the right, children playing on the left…
INVASIONS is a film about the Russian-Ukrainian war, which began in 2014 and which because of the full-scale invasion of 2022 was called «invasion» in English. And it’s also a film about plant invasions.
Some of the repressed stories of my ancestors can be rediscovered by me and used to better understand who I am. All the stories, which were repressed, are often repeated. Respectively, we may go from the specific to the general. I want to go back to the forgotten so as not to repeat it again and to see the reasons for our current state. Knowing the reasons, we will be able to accept reality and change it.
This tank-shaped salt lamp was purchased from a souvenir shop in Bakhmut in late 2016. Bakhmut (formerly Artemivsk) is a city in Eastern Ukraine famous for its salt mines. For a short period of time in 2014, the city was under occupation by Russian terrorists from the so-called DPR. Various salt lamps always were a large part of city’s souvenir industry, but this particular kind, in the shape of a tank, has only appeared recently, after the city was liberated by the Ukrainian army.
Such tank-shaped souvenirs are only a minor aspect of general traumatisation of the Ukrainian society caused by the war lasting since 2014. This traumatisation is yet to be overcome by the Ukrainians, a very long and complex process that might take many years. One of the many war wounds that we have yet to lick.
And we were licking (yes, physically licking this salt tank with our tongs) this particular one, day by day, bit by bit.
In the centre of city Dnipro, Ukraine, during the 50 years exist abandoned hotel ‘PARUS’ (SAIL). It had to become the symbol of the grandiosity of Dnipropetrovsk as the homeland of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. But it has never been opened — the construction stopped on the eve of collapse of the Soviet Union.
Since the 2000 the PARUS has been depicting as a completed building on calendars, in memes, art-projects, architectural visualizations. For a lot of people in Dnipro it’s already the symbol of the city, although it is unfinished.
CONCRETE AND UNCLEAR researched a plenty of PARUS’s interpretations in different analogue and digital mediums, and tried to capture condition of this collective dreaming.
The film was made with the support of the «Cultural Capital» program.
After Russian troops invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the famous Lviv playwright Andriy Bondarenko wrote a play about a life cut short by war.
He focuses on the life of his family. Peace and tranquility, which the author knew since childhood, are replaced by revolutions, wars, historical traumas. And now, as an adult, Andriy faces the threat that previous generations of his family witnessed. These thoughts were embodied in a one-act play written in response to the unfolding events.
To accompany this film version of the play, we use photographs from Bondarenko’s life, imagining the people who inhabited it and the people of Ukraine in general. The result is an act of artistic expression, memory and, ultimately, resistance.
A wooden bridge was installed over a wall on the border between Lunik IX and Lunik VIII neighborhood in Košice, Slovakia.
This wall is also known as the anti-Roma wall and was built by the locals to segregate the Roma community.
I practice making diptychs with other artists, because I am fascinated by how precisely random parts of the works coincide, how they recognize each other and influence each other, but this diptych I made and coincided with myself. Usually I refrain from explaining painting, but now, from the current point of circumstances and feelings, I am interested to
do it.
On the upper part there is a triangle where one woman gives birth, the second one receives the child, and the third one supports and rejoices for the one who gives birth. At first it revealed for me the birth of any real action, deed, understanding that among these actions there is no main one, they are necessary for each other. Now this part, perhaps, has become a little simplified, but also less indifferent for me, or maybe I just see in everything a message about the world that has to return to women in order to continue or complete, that is, to return whatever it is. On the second part of the triangle there is a tombstone of the oval – the shape through which a person sees the inevitable light when there is no other option but to be born. Nothing has changed with this component – the monument as a monument.
The world has shrunk, become even smaller and even more insecure. We all find ourselves practically in one big communal dwelling, where the imaginary doors can no longer be kept closed, and there is actually no place to escape from a fire or flood, because if you run through all the rooms, you risk ending up in the same one from where you started running. The Map of the World resembles an architectural plan of a large apartment. All rooms are passable, the walls of each room border on the neighboring ones just as their boundaries border in the real world.
Hunters go out hunting before dawn. In the darkness, they occupy comfortable positions on specially equipped towers and camouflage… waiting when the night mist clears… The first break of light dissolves a protective foggy veil and brings the first kill…
On the opposite side, there is a potential victim, which is unaware of being held at gunpoint…
He/She/It also expects the fog to disperse… For the hunted target, the first rays of the sun is a new day, a new hope, and a new fear…
A primal/animal fear that like an exposed nerve causes pain… a fear to open your eyes and look closer at the details, an anxiety to show up at the light, an uncertainty and frustration surrounding consciousness like a thick fog…
When I just started as a photographer, my pictures looked dim and dirty to me, especially compared to the top artists I was trying to follow. I was sure that my lack of skills and talent are the reasons.
When I went abroad for the first time, it was a surprise: my photos instantly started to look more «professional».
It took years of travel to start seeing my home from the outside. A gray faceless soviet heritage, which never looked great, was falling apart before my eyes during my entire childhood in Herson.
When I moved to Lviv, it became even more obvious: there was a layered mix of Polish, Jewish, Austrian and Soviet remains in a state of half-life.
Pop culture knows Ukraine as a place of Chornobyl, and I can’t blame it. My environment is a result of the ignorant russian intervention into nature and other cultures, and the consequent decay of its artifacts. Things were slowly changing over time, but a new war renewed the chaos.
I’ve started to make this series long before russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the torn-apart human bodies from my current newsfeed appeared native to my images. Now I know — they were always there. I was photographing the same war, but its previous iteration. All generations of my family suffered from the same aimless russian aggression. Now it is my turn.
Nevertheless, it’s my home, and I love my Pompeii. I use remains of my forever-falling-apart world as building bricks for my story. I want to leave things in a better state than I’ve found. It’s time to stop this ugly loop.
This project takes the shape of a Museum of Human Civilisation which is established in the future after humans go extinct. The Museum is dedicated to the future archaeology of a tailings dam in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine. A tailings dam is a system of special facilities for storing radioactive, toxic and other non-recyclable waste from mineral processing. The work touches upon the issue of man’s responsibility for natural resources and chimeric forms that the imprint of human activity on Earth may acquire
CLANKING, HAMMERING, DISPUTE AND GURGLING
The video CLANKING, HAMMERING, DISPUTE AND GURGLING is one of the parts of the TAILINGS DAM project. In video features two main characters heading for the Tailing dam and climbing it.
The video consists of four parts that parody other parts of this project.
The сlanking of the Scythian pommel.
Hammering on the pipes of the director of Kryvorizhstal, who was sitting in the bomb shelter.
Dispute, as a reflection of all the disputes and misunderstandings of our time, between countries and individual people.
Gurgling of the water extraction station (2093).
SCYTHIAN POMMEL
This is the oldest discovery of the Archaeological Expedition at the Tailings dam.
This is a rare cult object of Scythian culture, which dates to 354 BC.
As the THANK YOU series, TEA CEREMONY FIGURES are «in-between» objects. Those that are taking away from loneliness and lead to a live meeting, to a conversation and reflection/thinking, to an interlocutor and to a World where we are never alone.
Peculiar vouchers that «return to the action, to the meeting, to two pairs of different hands, which transfer to each other something most sacred, which from time to time has a different, diverse form».
Palianytsia means bread. In the classical sense, it is a large-sized round wheat bread baked in an oven.
At the start of the war that russia unleashed against Ukraine, the word «palianytsia» became a symbol since russian occupiers cannot pronounce it correctly. It became a shibboleth, distinguishing friend from enemy undoubtedly.
The Transcarpathian inspired the project, where I moved from my native Kyiv after the invasion. The villages there are surrounded and protected by the Carpathians; there are many mountain rivers, the waters of which run fast and polish the stones. Denys Ruban and I began to look more closely at the river stones…
The possibility of working on the project helps to stay sane, because we feel we do everything we can. We donate 100% of the money we receive for these artworks to volunteer organizations and friends who stayed in Kyiv and joined Territorial Defense forces there.
For the first two weeks of the war, it seemed to me that art was a dream, that all twenty years of my professional life were just something I had seen while night dreaming, that art was absolutely powerless and ephemeral in comparison to the merciless military machine destroying peaceful cities and human lives. Now I no longer think so: I see that every artistic gesture makes us visible and makes our voices heard!
The «Protective Layer» project is a continuation of my creative practice, but the changes in reality that are happening now have forced me to reconsider the meaning of previously created images and invented techniques.
The artistic world that I have been creating in recent years from wood was unexpectedly supplemented with metal. For me metal has always been an aggressive material, unlike wood. Working with it is always accompanied by danger: welding, burns, sparks, fire, rust, injuries – the potential for injury is inherent in metal because it is harder than the human body. In the presented project, the traumatizing and traumatized metal becomes the embodiment of the feelings of wartime, the constant ratio of protection and defenselessness.
I think that my art and this project cannot be a documentary evidence of the tragedy in the literal sense, but art rarely tells and describes events directly.
It is important for me that art captures the mental and physical tension that unites us all in the fight against the enemy and maintains faith. My artistic language has always contained the theme of victory
over death, but only now this theme is no longer abstract.
Materiality and weightlessness, multi-vector movement, and suddenly a twisted, closed space.
The internal state of an internally displaced person… The permanent state of a temporary displacement…
When moving, a person displaces not only the weight of the body but the circumstances too.
This is another dimension of the path that absorbs, immerses, colours.
Experiences of distance, metaphorical, emotional, physical impasse seep through us.
Here, the colour becomes a component of progress amid abandonment, the void of disappearance.
The shell dissolves, rubs off, peels off, and the space is filled with a memory that has no limits, no borders, no time.
Six months of internal immobility taught me to do everything as before, but the feeling of standing still did not disappear. Yet the bicycle wheels move fast.
Embracing with a look or imagination, I am in motion. I stand still and curl all the way up.
It closes into a holistic infinite form, a holistic time segment, and we can see more clearly what is really there.
The spinning circles are a combination of beginning and end.
Time is compressed into suffering, suffering in which certain work takes place, a telling reality that is
beyond metaphor.
We carry our way, suddenly it carries us. We walk on it, and it enters us.
We leave our traces, and it leaves its imprint on us.