Works on paper, from the “diary” series

Vlada Ralko’s Kyiv Diary, which begun with the December protests on Maidan and covered the active phase of hostilities in Eastern Ukraine, was compiled in 2013-2015. It is comprised of almost 400 regular A4 sheets of paper filled with drawings in ballpoint pen or watercolours, metaphorically representing the events, feelings, fears and hopes that held sway over us all, completely subjugating our daily life. The experience of reality changed by war is the key motif of the Kyiv Diary. (Oksana Barshynova)

Series of works on paper

The body compartmentalized by clothes, or simply empty clothes, is a metaphor for the separation of everything related to culture from ordinary human needs, such as drinking water or breathing. In other words, the human (dead or simulated) is separated from the living, but purely biological.

The body, loaded with a dead cultural heritage, cannot stand it and begins to turn into clothes or even run away. But the lack of a "protagonist" doesn't seem to bother the simulated culture, which is dizzyingly reproduced in "new collections".

Paintings, works on paper

Observing the body of landscape is sometimes similar to yearning of being able to painlessly transcend our own boundaries that separate us from external world. It is close to a child’s desire to have the ability to walk through the walls.

Still, on the other hand, the surface of the world has miraculous ability to convert the secret into accessible object, seducing the spectator with the opportunity to exchange invisible, obscure, unclear for visible, material, bodily.

sculpture and wall objects. Iron, composite aluminum, automotive enamel

The Heat project was provoked by the very call of the place, when the Crimean settlement, remote from the capital's audience, not only inspired but also attracted the work. All the work on the objects took place in Gurzuf. At first, the objects were planned to be implanted into the body of the space where they were created, wrapping them in the aura of the place. Next, we wanted to move the project forward by recreating it in new conditions. (Vlada Ralko, Volodymyr Budnikov)

Signs (A series of paintings)

Recently, we have been observing the fragmentation of traditional signs, as they have lost all their meanings.

They have long since turned into a widely used term, a ghost, a shadow of themselves, a burdensome simulacrum.

They look like painted doors that do not open.

A series of paintings

Envy for reality. Series of paintings

I have always been attracted by the differences between the external, the visible and something that is hidden inside. Since the observable is usually associated with the obvious, it would be logical to look for manifestations of what is happening inside, right in the visible. Despite my own habit of looking in a mirror for the smallest manifestations of what is developing deep inside of me, from time to time such logic starts seeming too fragile.

School Wool. 2004 - 2007. Series of works on paper. 30 x 21, watercolor, pencil, ballpoint pen

School Wool is a series of drawings/excursions into memory, and particularly into the droplets that store memories of elementary school. The main colors on nearly all the drawings are shades of iodine and green. It is a limited palette of a Soviet era childhood and of childhood injuries. For several years, I was collecting fragments of my own memory, which passed through the grinder of both myself and outside entities, both real and imaginary. They eventually accumulated into the constipation of an awkward past that will not pass. The body of drawings became a container for everything that has been deprived of a place in the legitimate personal world, all that is censored by conscience and displaced by common sense.