"After Russia's full-scale invasion, we turned the camera toward ourselves. We were curious about the relationship between Russian soldiers and our own bodies, so we created The Wanderer, 2022. We looked at images of dead Russian soldiers circulating on the Ukrainian internet, positioned ourselves to imitate them, and filmed the processes. Ethically, we could not ask somebody to pose as dead Russian soldiers for us."
"In wartime, death no longer carries the sacred, sublime aura found both in German Romanticism and Russian literary tradition. It is, rather, implemented as a tool. For Ukrainians, Russian bodies are symbols of resilience, of reclaiming territory and saving other Ukrainians' lives. At the same time, since World War II, Moscow has initiated around nine or ten military invasions in other countries."
"In the six-channel You Shouldn't Have to See This, 2024, we did not take a documentary approach, such as telling their stories and shortening your distance from them. We didn't want to become emotional mediators so you would understand their situation and feel a sense of compassion. We just went to their homes and filmed them in their most vulnerable state: sleeping."
Two Ukrainian artists began collaborating after the 2014 Maidan Revolution to document social transformation, focusing on how crowds become societies. Following Russia's full-scale invasion, their work shifted to examine relationships between Russian soldiers and Ukrainian bodies through performance art. Their project The Wanderer (2022) involved imitating images of dead Russian soldiers circulating online, treating death as an implemented tool rather than a sacred concept. They explore necropolitics—how Russian soldiers' bodies have historically been depicted—through performance rather than still photography. Subsequently, they documented Ukrainian children forcibly abducted to Russia, filming them in vulnerable sleeping states without employing traditional documentary storytelling or emotional mediation techniques.
#ukrainian-contemporary-art #performance-video-art #war-and-trauma-documentation #necropolitics #non-traditional-documentary
Read at Artforum
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]