Works on paper, from the “diary” series

Language is a political phenomenon. Language also makes a person human. Only a human who speaks can resist the invasion of the aggressor.

Ukraine and the whole world are faced with an evil that has not been given a name and therefore it has not yet been punished. Using Soviet technologies, Russia is constantly raping the dictionary, because a Soviet person should not have his own words. They have been replaced by propaganda slogans that legitimize the inhuman sadistic genocide of Ukrainians.

It is the duty and conscience of an artist to speak own language. I make these drawings during the war because I don't want to be mute.

Guests (2022-2023)

Melancholy for the Motherland (2015)

Salambo (2010)

Psyol River (2009)

Sky. Night. 2013, 200 x 150, oil on canvas

Earth. 2013, 100x200, oil on canvas

Heavy Sky, 2013, 200x100, oil on canvas

Series of paintings and works on paper

Currently, Ukraine and the rest of Europe are living as if in two parallel realities. For the Western world, the war mostly remains on the surface of the news screens. The scale of Russian crimes in Ukraine is so terrible that one’s mind refuses to perceive them as a domain of human existence, and tries to throw them all beyond vigilance, towards the vague realm of dreamland. However, in the rationality of the daylight, diplomatic and commercial relations with a state that commits all these crimes like a perverted butcher still seem to be quite acceptable.

Series of works on paper (in progress), works from Lviv Diary (in progress), video

The exhibition by Vlada Ralko and Volodymyr Budnikov is a spontaneous presentation of works created during their residency in Poznań as part of a program carried out by the Wielka 19 Association. The primary context for Ralko’s and Budnikov’s art is currently the Russian aggression in Ukraine. The artists create extremely intense works, originating not only in their thoughts and feelings, but also in their existential, visceral cognition of the horror of war, the refugee experience, and work as artistic nomads.

Works on paper

Intellectuals of the West find it difficult to acknowledge the validity of the ascertained, of implied simplicity received on the brink of war as part of the deal, as it were, rather than developed in a complex thought process. Moreover, calling for freedom and democracy to be defended by force based on solidarity hints at aggressive romanticism, a thing contradicting common sense. The rational mind has a tendency to combine incomparable matters in shared space, weighing ditches full of Ukrainian corpses against heating costs. Aspiring to impartiality, rationality shields humans against their capacity for feeling.

Digital print on faience plates, performance

In my work, I continue to delve into the kitchen topic as a manifestation of the matter certain sides of which always remain in the shadows within Christian culture, either because of their dirtiness and obscenity or because of their sacredness.

I created a series of images and lined them up in a certain sequence, taking into account both the parity of large and small plates and the parity of reality split into "low" and "high". In such a way, I perceive a weekly re-enactment of the ritual of festive food consumption as a historical ancestral landscape, where each solemn place is marked by an appropriate image.

Slogans (The series of works on paper)

Human life is often compared to a road subdivided into stages. Various situations in life, meanwhile, are usually regulated by so-called formats that dictate expectations and behaviors. This “formatting” occurs with mutual consent: authorities, the market or customs may define humankind’s lifestyle, and yet each person modulates his or her principles depending on what’s expected of him or her. In any case, people willingly perform a range of tasks, “for better, for worse,” at work and during their free time.

Internal Affairs (Potocki Palace and the Iohan Georg Pinzel Museum of Sculpture)

Digital photo (a combination of photos from the restaurant's kitchen and photos re-shot from the family's 1957 archival cookbook Polish Cuisine)

The processes that normally take place in the kitchen make a sequence of acts, where the raw cooking material goes through cutting-slashing-separating and finally appears in a fundamentally different quality.

Series of paintings

Discerning the outlines of a familiar childhood item under the museum glass, one cannot help but be surprised and subsequently jealous of an external narrative that sort of steals one’s private memories. However, these feelings somehow immediately turn into stiff boredom, as the signs of intimate history get drained, neutralised, and start collecting dust under the common gaze. The so-called release of memories has an inherent flavour of the aftertaste of villainy: an object from a family home or a sign from a den of secret memories is forcefully taken, displayed for public view, or renamed.

Series of paintings, works on paper, special object

When I look at Ralko’s works from The Quiet Zone series, what comes to mind is the words “the Institute of Nutrition.” In this series, Vlada seems to address values and the kitchen as the site of blood and a women’s site, a kitchen as a locus of materiality and flesh. It is more than likely that it had nothing to do with “the Institute of Nutrition” until I saw it (although who knows). And now I cannot unsee the “institute.” When I first heard this term as a child, I saw no other possible explanation for it than that it’s an institution where they teach how to eat people. (Larysa Venediktova)