Valentyn Odnoviun: Architecture of Evidence
© Valentyn Odnoviun, Surveillance
Valentyn Odnoviun: Visual Synecdoches*
The exhibition is titled Architecture of EVIDENCE, and it documents the evidence, or what is left of it, of torture, violence and human suffering in penitentiary institutions throughout Eastern European countries at times when their oppressive regimes were in power.
The exhibition is titled ARCHITECTURE of Evidence, and the images put together create a universal architectural design of a generalized oppressive institution.
Far from concentrating on atrocities, it is subdued and subtle. Valentyn Odnoviun focuses his camera on minute individual details as if putting a magnifying glass to them in order to reveal their horrifying significance.
The images don’t appear menacing. On the contrary, they are disguised to come across as being enchantingly beautiful. They may look like full moons in the dead of the night, like lunar paths on black water or elaborate abstract paintings.
Until one reads the descriptions.
Their seemingly decorative appearances conceal the shocking meaning. The series look as if the artist were attempting to put together a comprehensive inventory of an imaginary prison: metal bunks polished by detainees’ body movements in a former detention center, dusty spy holes in prison cell doors (Surveillance), cracked wall tiles in the cells of a Gestapo prison (Traces of Memory), cell windows of a former secret KGB prison smeared with paint, worn out stone stairs leading to basement dungeons where interrogations and executions were carried out (Horizons). These silent witnesses of once busy prison life were probably the only visual impressions the inmates were allowed, and the artist’s deceptive formal representation of these realia can be read as an attempt at the aesthetic transfiguration of this gloomy world as seen by desperate inmates’ eyes.
© Valentyn Odnoviun: The Process
Add to this The Process series (the image above): discarded unexposed sheets of photo paper found in a photography darkroom in a prison in Tallinn, Estonia. Picture the double portraits of the inmates – en face and in profile – appearing on these sheets in the developer. Odnoviun inhabits his imaginary prison with phantoms: “These untaken portraits serve as a metaphorical memorial for all people who were imprisoned, tortured, executed”, says the artist in his statement.
Valentyn Odnoviun has visited over 15 former political prisons in the Baltic states, Ukraine, Poland and Germany. Permissions to enter these institutions, unless they have been transformed into museums, are not easy to receive. They are either restricted or completely banned for civil visitation, they may be on the territory of a prison in operation, a police department, or are in a dilapidated condition and can collapse anytime. In Tallinn it took more than half a year of negotiating to enter the former Patarei Prison. In Poland, only 6 out of 20 requests for access to take photographs were reviewed positively.
What made the artist interested in his subject? Odnoviun dedicated "Surveillance" to his father, who spent more than four years in three different prisons as an asylum-seeker. This could partly explain the artist’s enchantment with this grim and sinister theme, but the question is still there. Communist repressions in most of Eastern European countries seem to be history now, but far too many family albums preserve the evidence of them.
In Ukraine, after recent prisoner - hostage exchanges with the separatist enclaves in Donbas, we hear numerous stories about torture chambers established in the occupied territory. One of those is ironically on the premises of the Donetsk Isolyatsia contemporary art center, where new artefacts are being made right on the spot, already in a gallery space.
What is Valentyn Odnoviun’s Architecture of Evidence? A reminder? A premonition? A foreboding?
*Synecdoche - a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole
© Igor Manko, 2020