Something recently alive becomes food for sustaining vital processes in the human body. It is not only about the kitchen routine, which is traditionally seen as a daily female duty or as approved by patriarchal society "three Ks" of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church); even within the haute cuisine, the semblance of morality is preserved by restraining the unpleasant dirty side within the kitchen walls.
Metaphorically, the kitchen is often referred to as a process of preparation that is never meant to be public. In Soviet times, kitchens served to gather people for critical discussions about the dominant system. In most cases, such communication resembled passive dissatisfaction rather than active protest— a sort of psychological coming to terms with the violence of the system. Normally, the space of the kitchen is perceived as marginal in the same way as some life processes are considered unsuitable for publicity or impure. In Eastern cultures, the house was cleaned after childbirth or a family member’s death, allowing individuals to firmly delineate themselves from the processes associated with an unknown dimension from which they came and to which they will inevitably return.
In this project, the hermetic nature of the kitchen space amidst the regular life course shows the suppression of the inner cruel side, the one capable of undermining the very pompousness of life, a kind of suppression that ensures the very existence of this pompousness. Inside the kitchen, one deals with what still resembles life and should suffer from violence, but for obvious reasons cannot anymore. For me, the kitchen became a symbol of the present time, where the official simulacra of reality exists separately from the harsh conditions we live in. War, occupation, and lawlessness have become "impure" customs of our life, a "zone of silence," an uncomfortable suppressed topic. The air is thick with fatigue that makes society accept the violence of the system. To maintain the appearance of a cozy comfortable life, this violence has already become an institutional norm. The simplified division into things for promulgation and things for suppression becomes a gap, a wound that can not heal until its complexity is acknowledged.
Internal Affairs. Between ourselves and the same, Lviv National Gallery of Art, Lviv (2020)
The photos I took in the kitchen of a prestigious restaurant and some copies from the Soviet book “Polish Cuisine” represent the internal processes I aim here to make public. The images from the kitchen are located in the Palace and the Church, the two places where the dirty processes for sustaining life have always been hidden and suppressed as hard as possible. Images from the PostUkrainian Body performance by Tanzlaboratorium group and the image of the pigeon remains resembling angelic wings with traces of corporeality were used as keys to the visual series. In the Potocki Palace, kitchen stories are scattered all around the space, while in the church, where the Pinzel Museum is located, these images are gathered together into an object-zine, a version of the single book of life where the childbirth, life routine, hedonistic pleasure, system violence, necessity, beauty, and death exist as a complex tangle of constant inquiries in the shared life cycle. (Vlada Ralko, Lviv, 2020)
Internal Affairs, publication. The Quiet Zone. From the book
Internal Affairs. Zin, digital print, metal, wood
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