From the Chinese Erotic Diary, watercolor and ballpoint pen on paper, А4, 2002
Let us go back to one of your first series, The Chinese Erotic Diary. First exhibited in Kyiv in 2002, it caused aesthetic shock: the public was unprepared for images of fragmented human bodies, stunning perspectives, explicit and physiological imagery. It was not about erotic images. The series was primarily about the tension between divergent national, cultural and political models, about the lack of cohesion in our Weltanschauung, about the pressure of social stereotypes, about the disconnect between the internal and the external. In The Chinese Erotic Diaries, the trope of bodily fragmentation hinted at trauma, and represented the lack of cohesion in superficial visions or memories. In the Kyiv Diary, which I began with the start of the events at Maidan, I interrogated bodies from a different perspective: the events unfolding right under our very eyes, and then in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, were absolutely eloquent. Traumatized or burning bodies were both metaphors and reality. Many drawings document literal reality speaking through the events of the time. The yearning to live, fight, lose and die was a concrete human project coming to life right under our eyes. I drew what I saw, what I heard on the news. I drew the mixture of rumors, hearsay, fears, myths and premonitions. Which art events in Ukraine were formative for you as an artist? Head in the Morning, acrylic and felt-tip pen on canvas, 160 x 100 cm, 2009 (From the Military Sanatorium project) I remember the early s 1990 , when many Kyiv halls started to mount large-scale exhibitions of the new free art. They were a breath of fresh air after suffocating shows at the Union of Artists. We were frantically making up for the lost time and filling the blank spots. Feed the Cat by Oleksandr Hnylytskyj or The Yellow Room by Oleg Golosiy flash before my eyes. During the student years, my friends and I would go to the foreign literature library. Its reading room stocked foreign journals on contemporary art. Library books and journals usually had a small log on the last page, listing the names of those who checked them
From the Kyiv Diary, watercolor and ballpoint pen on paper, А4, 2013–2016
out before you. I often saw familiar names, including Hnylytskyj… We were starved for information: you might find books about classical avant-garde in libraries, but the current goings-on in world art were much harder to track. Lately you have been collaborating with the artists Volodymyr Budnikov and Oleksandr Babak. What do these projects mean for you? I have never worked in a group previously. For me, it was more natural to “slip out” of all organized systems, to stay outside currents, to avoid clear definitions, to stay on my own. Our joint projects, first with Volodymyr Budnikov, then with Budnikov and Babak, started not so long ago. Granted, our shows with Budnikov (Heat in 2011, Poet’s Shelter in 2014, Shelter in 2015) united two independent artists who reflected on certain shared themes, but our projects with Budnikov and Babak (and the curator Valeriy Sakharuk) had a joint plan and theme. The three of us are fairly different, we belong to different generations and have different perspectives. We watch our shared themes evolve through time, but each of us has his or her own timeline. Even in joint projects, we work separately and independently, rendering any chance of mutual influences impossible. Everything we do share stems logically from our differences, and this is how events happen. Our country is going through tough times. How do artists feel? How would you describe the role of artists in the present cultural situation? Every society is tempted to manipulate values and fill the blank spots left after social shifts with something conveniently inoffensive. The state is trying to back art into a corner yet again, so artists have to resist. There’s nothing new about the situation. For as long as I remember, collaboration with the state had always been considered indecent, irreconcilable with freedom of speech. Independent art finds itself almost outlawed yet again in present-day Ukraine. In Soviet times, any encounter with the state could have repercussions for the artist. These days, artists are just ignored or used, much like before, as a “smokescreen” for the West: their works demonstrate our ostensible adherence to contemporary cultural trends. The important things attained during the Maidan protests are lost, we are going back to the beginning… It seems like there are two countries: the dependent and the independent Ukraine. Should the state remain Soviet in essence and imitate independence instead of fighting for it, its artists would have no choice but to fight for and defend independence. Artists are backed into the role of incomprehensible, unpleasant or difficult aliens. I think the present-day Ukrainian situation, when almost every event reveals a global problem, grants power to some artists, to the very few. I don’t think we should expect a renaissance of art under the circumstances: the state does not understand artists’ role. “Official” art projects initiated by state institutions are as bogus as Soviet art. When an artist says something truly important, the state ignores it outright. But an artist is Ukraine, especially now, when identifying as Ukrainian is a meaningful choice. In conversation with Galyna Sklyarenko
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