Ghosts of Memories | Memories about Ghosts
Digital collages, photographic installation, PVC and textile prints, 2024
Project exclusively created for the solo exhibition in off_gallery (Graz, Austria) in 2024. Curated by Eva Fomitski.
Since early years I used to work mostly with the natural landscapes of my home region – Ukrainian East – by means of performance, photography and video. Physical presence in the environments, through intervening in them with her own body or through bringing in them inanimate objects, was a core principle of my artistic method. Because of the global lockdown in 2020, I’ve lost access to the landscape for the first time, and had to invent another way of interacting with it. Thus the first set of collages from the series «Reused landscapes» – «Material Casts Shadow» – was created. In its frames, I manipulated the images of the landscapes captured as a part of my previous art projects, replacing the documented traces of my physical presence in them with the elements of the digital world. Through the play of pixel shadows cast from the basic graphic shapes upon what wasn’t a real landscape, but only its reminiscence, I reflected on the topics of the isolation and forced absence, on fading memories and ghosts of the past. Another work from the «Reused landscapes», «My New Horizon» was a compilation of every landscape I have ever artistically entered, in which all separate horizon lines united in one new horizon. It was presented to the public once, but in summer 2022, when I had to flee from her home in Kharkiv, it was left behind and never found again.
With the full-scale invasion of Russia, I’ve lost access to the landscapes of my home region once again – those fields, hills and forests to the north-east from Kharkiv, where I used to perform, turned into the battlegrounds, littered with the land mines and remains of the military vehicles. For long time they will be associated with nothing other than war, devastation and suffering. Familiar places turned into shadowy ghosts of themselves, always slipping away, forever lost, forever stuck somewhere in-between, neither real nor imaginary, neither present nor absent. They became so distant, it’s impossible to tell for sure anymore, whether even the memories about them are true. Haunted by these intense feelings, thoughts and questions, I continued the «Reused landscapes» series with the images of the landscapes from my post-pandemic and pre-invasion artworks. In some sense, the pieces exhibited at off_gallery under the new title «Ghosts of Memories | Memories about the Ghosts» concludes the entire «peaceful» period of my landscape work, to which – even if those Ukrainian landscapes become accessible once again – I will never be able to return.
