Afraid to tell it like it is, we sought to localize and fence in the dangerous processes or even ideas that could undermine the comfort of our familiar world. Once we acknowledge that the line of contact is the line of battle, we start to see battles everywhere.
No longer a way to fence off a territory, the line started to redefine all boundaries, radically affecting our perspective. Familiar borders are no longer inanimate lines on a map: they become high-tension lines or lines of violence, cutting through animate beings or beings that we had previously considered animate.
Hence, irrespective of our will, things themselves cast off artificial meanings that were forcefully ascribed to them and restore their true meanings. To put it another way, it’s as if we confronted things for the first time: earlier knowledge is proven false, falsified, distorted by the current experience. The line of fire is like a line in a drawing or writing where objects or words are only made visible by lines.
The objects that, we believed, belonged to us, were ours, held us whole, kept our human nature inside, have to be parsed anew and separated from that which we only call ours out of habit.
When working on this project, we made a choice not to mention any events directly: we discussed them through other things and pursued meanings through metaphors driven to absurdity. Belonging always manifests itself through difference; a collapse into the similar or into the selfsame would mark a defeat.
Instead of splitting hairs over what’s ours and what isn’t, we have to respect the line that defines what’s ours against that which only appears ours in the changed world.
About the works
Signs Black signs on the coloured backgrounds of these ten canvasses define the border between two ambiguities (signs and backgrounds). Although arbitrary in shape, the signs never lose their contours: they cannot get lost or interrupted, the dense dark ambiguity of a sign has to remain fenced in, it cannot escape through a break in its contour and blend with the background. The shape of each sign could be neither foreseen nor defined in advance: they were not finalized until they were put on canvas. Despite the title, the meanings of these “Signs” remain obscure, concealed in darkness. Black colour absorbs familiar information and emanates the dense tension of previously unknown meanings. Each sign is akin to a word that cannot be uttered, although its existence is beyond doubt.
Folds These works were inspired by baroque folds, the expanse of cloth that follows neither a body nor architectural forms. Unlike suspended or “stoppered” time in “temporal folds” described by Merab Mamardashvili in his Talks on Thinking, baroque cloth appears to exist in isolation, uninfluenced by the will of others. It rises up and casts or shakes out time that got caught in its folds. Besides, baroque cloth is always in movement, changing configuration and folding into something akin to an exulted landscape with endless combinations of contact lines. This is a landscape in continuous creation; cloth is not given a chance to linger in peace.
Six large drawings stand out against: the folds in them are petrified, gothic. The selected order of lines is frozen in its proper place, as if the cloth has turned to stone.
From Here and From There The early days of the Ukrainian resistance movement saw the rise of popular guesstimates stating that the final line of contact will run “along the Dnieper.” The prediction produced a series of mystical reflections about the likelihood of this “theory.” (We could see the line of Dnieper outside our window as we worked at the Kaniv studio.) Most works are “struck through” by a stylized line of the river: both banks of the Dnieper become a stage for complicated interrelations of the dramatis personae of the conflict. Therefore, this intricate structure renders a simplistic mechanical division impossible. The characters of these works eschew recognition and naming. We chose to mix metaphors, symbols and allegories with nonsense to manifest the treacherous caverns that just simulate meanings.
The work that depicts Mars and Venus seated on the riverfront of the Dnieper – the hypothetical “line of contact” – evokes Botticelli’s painting. The frozen balanced classical composition brims with anxiety: ostensible calm conceals tension that remains unlocalized in peaceful territories during wartime, flooding all spaces.
Base A series of Kaniv landscapes depicts a unique collection of objects that pepper the territory around Kniazha Hora like surreal monuments. Fragments of natural landscapes look like statues, architectural structures boil down to the conciseness of a sign under the pressure of time and ideological shifts. Stripped of their original context, they venture into a new life: forgotten, stuck in a space that seems pumped empty of air, excised from the world outside. Having lost their essential function in constant changes, they become a paragon of pure loneliness. (Volodymyr Budnikov, Vlada Ralko. Kaniv, 2016)
*The project was supported by ChervoneChorne Art Group