Valentyn Odnoviun: Architecture of Evidence
© Valentyn Odnoviun, Surveillance
AGNĖ NARUŠYTĖ: A Single Viewer’s Observation
When Valentyn Odnoviun first showed these photographs to me, for a few moments I thought they were planets. One looks like the Earth. Another, like Mars. Or maybe the Moon. In one image, darkness scarfs an edge of the Earth — it is an eclipse, or maybe the waning. Yet soon cracks and fissures come into focus and dismantle this cosmic poetry: the shapes of “continents” are shredded, the red Mars is scratched, the edge of the blue planet is not waning, but has been pried open like a soup can, and the amber of Saturn reveals the outline of a room. In an instant, the image is turned inside out: the bulging balls become holes plugged with thick pieces of glass. If you got closer, you could see something through them, but the photographer does not do it; he focuses on the glass, on the thickness of experiences, the traces of something. Of something bad, for the Martian redness may be blood.
The titles help to solve the photographic riddle: these are the spyholes of the KGB and Stasi prisons in Vilnius, Riga, Cēsis, Tallinn, Lviv, Warsaw and East Berlin. The design is universal, but the “eyes” of each facility are of a different colour, as if it was important to express the prison’s identity. Some spyholes of the walking yards in the KGB prison of Vilnius are white — they look like a “snowball” Earth. Amber belongs to the cells in Riga and Lviv, but several blue spyholes from Cēsis have been shattered and daubed over — like dying planets. One cell for those condemned to death has a bleeding carcass revealed in its torn body. The water-like, orange and whitish spyholes of the Mokotów prison in Warsaw and Stasi remand prison in Berlin look like a forbidden paradise fenced off by a thick wall. The photographer looks into those holes as if through the illuminator of a spaceship.
I cannot break away from cosmic associations because they are part of the visual effect. The circle has always been the symbol of perfection and divinity. This geometrical shape was conceived from the observations of the Sun and the Moon, a kind of projection of celestial bodies on Earth, which was still “flat” then. The joint efforts of scientists to understand the circle have reached towards geometry, astrology and astronomy. As if to restore that link, Odnoviun photographs the spyholes shining like ancient worlds lost in darkness, but already burdened with the history of oppression invented by humanity. This juncture — of an unearthly beauty and the knowledge that it is made of dirt — draws my gaze into each photograph. I am not surprised that this series won the 2016 Debut competition held by the Union of Lithuanian Art Photographers in Vilnius. The artist has discovered a symbol for our collective trauma of the 20th century. He has drawn it from the material heritage of occupations endured by several neighbouring countries. The repeating shape of surveillance suggests we should get rid of our solipsist moaning by simply looking from a different perspective, which grants more objectivity and helps us to overcome the self-imposed separation and solitude.
The scratches, the stains and rust that have patterned the spyholes seem to be the evidence of violence, although it would be naive to try and trace their specific causes. Yet our imagination does not need that: the scenes from documentaries and stories about the methods of interrogation used by the KGB run in our minds in accelerated motion. I see bodies being beaten and blood splashed behind the glass. But it could be vice versa. Perhaps, the surveilled prisoner is trying to defend himself from the gaze: he scratches the glass and stabs at the surveillant’s eyes. These visual eruptions of passion make it impossible for us to compare the experience of those monitored in KGB prisons with the neutralised effect of surveillance cameras today. The glass in the spyholes is a membrane absorbing the gaze, not letting the rage through, but preserving the traces of struggle, which sometimes remind of continents and craters… My imagination slips from horror to cosmos again — aroused by this uncanny beauty, stretched between the poles of the oxymoron.
I bring myself back to the reality of surveillance in the KGB and STASI prisons. Since I can see nothing through these spyholes, I observe myself observing. I spend quite a long time standing in front of each photograph. My gaze does participate, but on which side am I? Am I the surveillant or the surveilled? The answer would change everything. I realise that I assume the position of the surveillant automatically, trying to discern how the cell or the walking yard looks like, to see a prisoner from the past trapped inside like an insect in amber. I guess even Odnoviun has photographed the spyholes from the surveillant’s side. The possibility to observe grants us power and triggers fantasy. While watching the other’s body like an animal in its cage, one can read its thoughts and torments, enjoy its fear or boredom and imagine the ways to enhance the sensation. For me, the viewer of this series, to stay in the surveillant’s place is safer: it is far easier to feel horrified at the cruelty of the system than to imagine myself being watched on the other side of the spyhole.
Yet the abstract photographs allow for the situation to be turned around, like it did when the users of those buildings replaced each other over time. For example, the KGB building in Vilnius housed a court of the Russian Empire; Germans and Bolsheviks occupied it during the World War I; then it was taken by the Poles, afterwards by NKVD, then Gestapo, and then by the KGB. Now it is a court of justice again and houses The Museum of Genocide Victims. Injustices should stay safely dead in the museum — a guarantee that history should not be repeated. Yet the war started by Russia in the Ukraine in 2014 remind us how little is needed to start the carousel of occupations rolling again. With his photographs of spyholes Odnoviun provides evidence that the spaces constructed for surveillance, oppression and violence still exist and lurk hungry for real action. These spyholes are time capsules. As I look at the photographs, I count at least three meanings of this overused term. The first one is conventional. The glass has gathered the scratches as a kind of writing by numerous prisoners and their guards. The ever changing ideologies and certainties have caused this asymmetric opposition, but their traces have been fused into an indecipherable nodule. Differently from the removed Soviet monuments, these spyholes have been preserved for the present, maybe accidentally, so that they could remind us of the Soviet system of total surveillance without reiterating what is already known. A betrayal that cannot be shown, a strike that cannot be heard, a torment that cannot be narrated may affect us more powerfully than explicit documentation, especially when everything is concentrated in a circle.
The second meaning: the time of sitting on one side and observing on the other was long. Can somebody who has not been in such a situation imagine how it is to be in a cell only with your own self, your suffering, perhaps forever? The opaque “eye” is the only link to the other and that other is a representative of the system, which has imprisoned you here. Time coils around the suffering or repenting or bored self into a ball of unbearable present, without a continuation towards any future, while the tail of the past is shrinking.
The third meaning brings us back to the cosmic perspective, abandoned while thinking about the concrete prison cells. In the first exhibition of this series in Vilnius, I was surrounded by these blue, yellow, white and red spyholes and felt like being in an observatory of violence and pain. Specific historical circumstances became not so important because the desire to destroy or abuse or subdue the alien other is eternal. In this sense the photographic series Surveillance by Valentyn Odnoviun is relevant not only to the countries, which endured Soviet occupation, but to the entire world, now relapsing to nationalism and nativism in order to quench their populations’ fear of mass migration with walls, prison cells, refugee camps and other entrenchments. With the far right rising everywhere, “ordinary” people increasingly risk to find themselves in now still extraordinary conditions: become displaced and imprisoned for an indefinite length of time because the old rules might no longer apply in the future. The artist’s appeal (for peace) therefore should be taken as universal.
© AGNĖ NARUŠYTĖ
Agnė Narušytė is an art critic, curator, researcher at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute, associated professor at the Vilnius Academy of Art and the editor of photography page at the weekly 7 meno dienos; she also writes commentaries on culture for the Lithuanian National Radio. Narušytė’s authored books include: The Aesthetics of Boredom: Lithuanian Photography 1980–1990 (Vilnius: Vilnius Academy of Arts Publishers, 2010), Lithuanian Photography: 1990–2010 (Vilnius: baltos lankos, 2011, in Lithuanian), Camera obscura: The History of Lithuanian Photography 1839–1945 (together with Margarita Matulytė, Vilnius: Vilnius Academy of Arts Publishers, 2016, in Lithuanian).