Vlada Ralko - PROJECTS AND SERIES

The Phantom of Liberty* (One’s Own, Mine, Alien, Shared, Free)

I call to the mysterious one who yet

Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream

And look most like me, being indeed my double,

And prove of all imaginable things

The most unlike, being my anti-self.

(William Butler Yeats)

Series of 23 works on paper

Both work and the church regulate and structure bodies, lending physical organs purpose. Wherever the Custom retains its influence, simple physical toil functionally acquires a sacred dimension. It is instated through a seemingly “natural” assignment of roles: the man automatically has power over the woman simply because he’s physically stronger, the healthy survive while the weak perish, etc.

A series of works on paper

Reserve* (2017)

RESERVE. IDEA

«The following video contains violence. We need to process it prior to broadcast.»

(from a TV news segment)

Lately, I’ve been plagued by the feeling that the overall panorama of contemporary life crumbles because some fragments of it are always being concealed from us. Inconvenient or superfluous elements are excised from our quotidian existence, making the present-day reality split and slip into repetitions.

Contact line* (with Volodymyr Budnikov). Paintings, works on paper

LINE OF CONTACT (BETWEEN THE SELF AND THE SELFSAME)

For the last three years, our attention has been riveted to the so-called “line of contact.” In the early days of the hostilities in the East, the line was ostensibly justified by the logic of separating “what is ours” from “what is alien”. It has since spread, turning from a line into a surface.

Sculpture. Ceramics and porcelain

Seven paintings. For the Art School project (with Volodymyr Budnikov and Oleksandr Babak. Curated by Valerii Sakharuk)

"There is no dress more beautiful in the world than the bronze of muscles and the freshness of skin" (V. Mayakovsky)

Anatomy (from the Greek "anatome" - dissection)

I once liked the story of the butcher mentioned by Baudrillard in Symbolic Exchange and Death. There, the butcher talked about his knife, the blade of which always hit the voids between the lumps of joints with great skill. In this way, the butcher could cut through the body of a dead animal with ease, and his knife did not need to be sharpened because it did not come across hard bones.

Shelter* (with Volodymyr Budnikov)(2015)

Series of 12 paintings, 200 x 150, acrylic on canvas

A perilous rift is born of the ambiguity of war and peace, the abyss that the essence sinks into. It perishes while the world scatters in panic. In the spaces that we expected to offer us the salvation of values opens the abyss, an absence, an unsprung trap. We slip into the rift between wrongdoing and the crime of omission.