Crimea: A No Man's Land
© Vitaly Fomenko
Part 3 Manipulated
This segment of the exhibition includes “manipulated” photography, hand-colored to multiexposure, digital montage to found material and installation. This assortment of techniques and conceptualist approaches to their work allows the artists richer opportunities to reflect on social, political, and aesthetic issues related to the history of Crimea, the 2014 annexation, and its today’s realities.
Each portfolio is accessed by the link in photographer's descriptions below.
Roman Pyatkovka
Roman Pyatkovka's (b. 1955) is a Kharkiv-based artist. His 1991 I Was Born in Childhood series is a chance to look at Sevastopol, Crimea, of 1964, as it was when the photos were taken by the then 9 year old artist. We see people on holiday (Pyatkovka's family and himself) posing for the camera with the obligatory tourist attractions in the background – the sea, the Sevastopol landmarks, sea-boats and rocks. When the artist accidentally found the film decades later, printed the images and hand-colored them in a popular Kharkiv photography technique, they became a sentimental artistic reflection on one's childhood and a nostalgic documentation of the Soviet Union idyllic life in 1960s seen from 1991 – the year of its collapse.
Portfolio: I Was Born in Childhood, 1991
Krolikowski Art
Alexandra Krolikowska (b. 1990) & Alexander Krolikowski (b. 1982) are a family duo that call themselves Krolikowsky Art. Before 2014 they lived in Sevastopol, Crimea, but had to flee from their home after the Russian invasion. They moved to Donetsk in East Ukraine where a grandmother's apartment was – only to be forced to leave once more a few months later when Russia sparkled a separatist movement there. The family is living in the town of Slavutich near Kyiv now.
Start Over (2012) is a series of multiexposure images shot in Sevastopol. The artists merged the photos of historical military armaments at a memorial to the wars of the 19th and the 20th centuries in Crimea with those of the graves of soldiers killed in those wars. In the performance that was to go along with the work, Krolikowski Art duo destroyed the photopaper images brushing them over with special chemical solutions, “to erase the traces of the war from our memory, to start the whole story over” from a clean slate. This anti-war project didn't prevent the 2014 events in Crimea, when its turbulent history repeated itself with yet another invasion.
The Crimea Dreaming (2012) is a series of color analog images made to appear as awkwardly printed amateur photographs. The family album style of the series, the dreamlike ambiance of the pictures showing the artists' life in Sevastopol acquired a different meaning two years after their creation. Today it tells a dramatic story of “paradise lost”.
© Krolikowski Art.. Overcoming/Undercoming
Overcoming/Undercoming (above) is a diptych consisting of two multiexposures made in December 2013, when revolutionary events in Ukraine were gaining momentum. At this time Sevastopol and Crimea in general were shaken by violent anti-Ukraine demonstrations led by Russian provocateurs, which the pro-Ukraine minority was trying to counter. Alexandra Krolikowska was beaten up during one of these confrontations. The diptych, the artists comment, demonstrates their “spontaneous and subconscious” reaction to the events.
Portfilios: Start Over, Crimea Dreaming, 2012
Iryna Chenyshova
Iryna Chenyshova (b. 1968) lives in Kyiv. From 2000 to 2014 Crimea was a favorite holiday destination for her and her family.
Glimmering (2012) is a series of images made at nighttime with a help of a flashlight. A beam of light illuminates isolated objects surrounded by the dark Crimean night, singling out their beauty that goes unnoticed in broad daylight. Now that Crimea has become an unwelcoming and often hostile place to visit, these salvaged visual memories are the only consolation remaining for many Ukrainians.
Portfolio: Glimmering, 2012
Daryna Deyneko-Kazmiruk and Sergei Kazmiruk
Daryna Deyneko-Kazmiruk (b. 1986) and Sergei Kazmiruk (b. 1985) are a family duo based in Kyiv. In 2013 they participated in art residences in Koktebel, Crimea, where these projects were made.
To an unassuming mind nothing in the peaceful 2013 Koktebel summer predicted the stream of events in March 2014 that led to the annexation of Crimea. Nonetheless, it was then (2013) that the Kazmiruks made Kimmeria to Remember, where they physically (with the help of scissors or plastic bags) removed parts of the landscape from a bigger picture – “to take the memories home”, as if they knew what was about to happen shortly.
Portfolio: Kimmeria to Remember, 2013
Vitaly Fomenko
Vitaly Fomenko (b. 1983) lives in Sevastopol, which provides him a unique opportunity to witness the life in Crimea after the annexation.
The Karadag Mountain in Eastern Crimea has always been popular with photographers. Fomenko's Karadag series (2014) shows the famous landmark in window reflections where its image becomes merged with dilapidated empty hotel room interiors, creating a visual metaphor of the disastrous tourist season in the occupied peninsula.
Fomenko's The Honor Roll (2015) is in fact a series of reproductions of found material: it shows half-ruined discarded photographs that had belonged to a Ukrainian military cantonment and were ditched after the place was ceded to Russian troops without a fight. In his statement the artist explains:
Winter of 2015, Sevastopol. A rubbish dump. As I was passing by, my eyes stumbled upon the artifacts of a Ukrainian military facility: honor roll photos of Ukrainian soldiers, their personal files, psychological tests – ruthless documents of Crimea's most recent history. I began to dig specifically, with a rake, clearing the piles of debris, like an archaeologist, carefully and gently.
The portraits in this expressive Fomenko's work appear like zombie phantoms, a spiritual visitation of the seemingly bloodless war.
Portfolios: Karadag, 2014; The Honor Roll, 2015
Oleksandr Bychenko
Oleksandr Bychenko was born in 1986 in the city of Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro), Ukraine. He spent his school years vacation time in Crimea, where part of his family is still living and where “every turn of the street and every crack in the sidewalk were familiar”.
The Crimean Project is a digital montage of two found material sources of very different nature. One is scans of a Soviet-time published album of Saint-Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) bridges and embankments; the other is Internet-based images of the military troops that Russian propaganda called “polite green little men” - the camouflaged Russian soldiers without any military insignia or identification marks who invaded Crimea in March 2014. The polygraph raster of the scans contrasting with the pixelated Internet images underline the unnatural and artificial combination, as if dispatching the military back to a Russian city where they should belong and freeing the territory of their bareknuckle invasion.
Portfolio: The Crimean Project, 2015
Vita Buivid
Vita Buivid (b. 1962) formed as an artist in the photographic community of Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. She moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1989. In her work she uses a variety of techniques centered around photography as her major media.
Buivid’s Artek (2015) is an art installation consisting of eleven metal bed frames, eleven quilted cotton mattresses and a photographic print.
Artek is a legendary Young Pioneer summer camp on the Black Sea shore in Crimea, established in 1925. To stay in the camp was considered a privilege that Soviet children were awarded with for extraordinary achievements.
Vita Buivid’s dimly lit installation interprets its lethargic off-season appearance with heavy rolled-up mattresses on bare metal bed frames. It contrasts with the photograph on the wall depicting three athletic young military style adepts. The installation offers a narrow range of interpretations, focusing on the emotional frustration of the events of the so-called Russian Spring of 2014 in Crimea. It can be viewed in the context of Leni Riefenstahl's “Olympia” images with their cult of the body, physical strength and victorious achievements ideology. The “healthy mind in a healthy body” adage, so popular with the Soviet physical culture educationalists, acquires a new, somewhat ominous meaning in this installation.
Portfolio: Artek, installation, 2015
Julia Polunina-But
Julia Polunina-But (b. 1985, Symferopol, Crimea) has been living in Kyiv since 2006. Her January 2014 visit to Crimea for a family reunion occurred when the peninsula was still territory under Ukraine’s jurisdiction. This was her last opportunity to be with her family before she created the Images series in February, 2016. The Russian annexation of March, 2014 not only made visitation unwelcoming for Ukrainians, it also divided people in their political attitudes and preferences, bringing about intolerance and hatred.
15 vario lenticular prints that comprise the series are reproduced from the artist’s family album. The artist used pixelated images for the pictures that looked out of focus at various angles. The Image series addresses the destroyed link that used to connect one with one’s past, family and friends, the 21-year-long stretch of one’s life in a place to which there is no return, about a mind haunted by blurred faces and fading memories.
I keep going through my last day home in my mind. It was so typically Crimean: tediously winterly and extremely warm. My Mom and I were riding on a yellow shuttle-bus lit by sunshine. I remember the people on the bus, where they sat and what they talked about - but I can’t recall what my Mom looked or how she was dressed. Was she wearing her favorite earrings (she wore them for thirty years)? What was her face like? I try to recall my grandma’s wrinkles, my sister’s and niece’s blue eyes, my goddaughter’s hair color, my granddad’s smile. I am trying, but only blurred childhood images emerge instead, the images of the time when I had a large and happy family. I am hiding among those memories fitting the images together like jigsaw puzzle pieces.
Portfolio: Images, 2016