I II III IV V VI VII
stanislava pinchuk The Archeology of Loss Data Map Topographic Radioactivity: Unpaved Earth—I from the series Sarcophagus 2017 pin-holes on paper 75 × 101 cm Data Map Topographic Radioactivity: Unpaved Earth—I from the series Sarcophagus 2017 pin-holes on paper 75 × 101 cm Data Map Topographic Radioactivity: Concrete Ground Laid Post—1986 II from the series Sarcophagus 2017 pin-holes on paper 75 × 101 cm Data Map Topographic Radioactivity: Concrete Ground Laid Post—1986 II from the series Sarcophagus 2017 pin-holes on paper 75 × 101 cm Data Map Topographic Radioactivity: Concrete Ground Laid Post—1986 II from the series Sarcophagus 2017 pin-holes on paper 75 × 101 cm Data Map Topographic Radioactivity: Concrete Ground Laid Post—1986 II from the series Sarcophagus 2017 pin-holes on paper 75 × 101 cm Data Map Topography: Shrine for a Destroyed Home (triptych) from the series Fallout 2016 pin-holes on paper 101 × 225 cm
VIII Micro-topographies Trampled Tent from the series Borders 2018 pin-holes on paper 75 × 57 cm IX Micro-topographies Shotgun Shell from the series Borders 2018 pin-holes on paper 75 × 57 cm X Micro-topographies Dug Hiding Hole from the series Borders 2018 pin-holes on paper, artist frame with inlaid terrazzo 75 × 57 cm XI Micro-topographies Footpath / Trampled Prayer Mat from the series Borders 2018 pin-holes on paper 75 × 57 cm XII Micro-topographies Destroyed Kiosk from the series Borders 2018 pin-holes on paper 75 × 57 cm XIII TOPOGRAPHY Entire Camp (triptych) from the series Borders 2018 pin-holes on paper 150 × 306 cm XIV Air Sonic Notation (Bomb Reverberation, Mariupol) from the series Surface to Air 2015 pin-holes on paper 75 × 57 cm XV Air Sonic Notation (Heart Beat) from the series Surface to Air 2015 pin-holes on paper 75 × 57 cm XVI Air Sonic Notation (Car Bomb, Kharkov) from the series Surface to Air 2015 pin-holes on paper 75 × 57 cm XVII Surface Donetsk I (Topographic Data Map) from the series Surface to Air 2015 pin-holes on paper 150 × 110 cm XVIII Surface Kharkov (Topographic Data Map) from the series Surface to Air 2015 pin-holes on paper 150 × 110 cm XIX Terrazzo II from the series Borders 2018 camp remnants and ash resin (ceramic plates, construction, plastics, electrical wires, kiosk tiles, nutella lid, SIM cards, tent fastener, toothbrushes) 13 × 13 × 19 cm XX Terrazzo III from the series Borders 2018 camp remnants and ash resin (kiosk tile, pepsi lids, plastic fork & knife, plastic plumbing, razors, shotgun shells, SIM cards, tent pole, toothbrushes, toothpaste) 12.5 × 12 × 16 cm XXI Terrazzo IV from the series Borders 2018 camp remnants and ash resin (buttons, cable ties, electrical cable spools, kiosk tile, plumbing rubber tubing, shotgun shells, SIM cards, tar road & burnt ground, tent pole watch strap) 12 × 11 × 7 cm XXII Terrazzo V from the series Borders 2018 camp remnants and ash resin (comb, construction plastic, shaving cream, shotgun shells, sunglasses, tent pole, toothbrush, torch light) 18.5 × 11 × 5 cm XXIII Terrazzo VII from the series Borders 2018 camp remnants and ash resin (buttons, cable ties, electrical cable spools, kiosk tile, plumbing rubber tubing, shotgun shells, SIM cards, tar road & burnt ground, tent pole, watch strap) 31.5 × 22.5 × 4.5 cm XXIV Terrazzo VIII from the series Borders 2018 camp remnants and ash resin (buttons, cable ties, electrical cable spools, kiosk tile, plumbing rubber tubing, shotgun shells, SIM cards, tar road & burnt ground, tent pole, watch strap) 12 × 11 × 7 cm XXV Terrazzo IX from the series Borders 2018 camp remnants and ash resin (ceramic plates, mosque tiles, electrical cables, kiosk tile, plastic construction pipe, shotgun shells, tent poles) 31.5 × 22.5 × 4.5 cm
Text by Maria Tumarkin A thought halfway through a sleepless night: Pinchuk has the word ‘pin’ in it.
Giant mushrooms. It’s funny, she says, maybe she doesn’t say it’s funny, maybe it’s me who says it, but the thing is if you push people up against the knowledge that the damage done to our world is irreversible, fantasies of repair will invariably pop out, take hold. About Fukushima people would say, ‘Oh but nature and the animals are reclaiming it.’ And she’d think, ‘Bullshit. All the nature and animals there are dead.’ What looks alive can be dead. What is most visible can be the most dead. Nature reclaiming sites of war – another self-soothing lie about repair. Those ruins of Berlin with their wild vegetation, for instance. The fantasy was that nature (flora and fauna) could undo history too, not just the damage done by the anthropogenic disasters. She says they built a park after erasing the Calais Refugee Camp in France, after burning it to the ground – a park no one goes to. Catastrophe punctures – yes – but it also hangs in the air and gets into the soil. And there it stays. To make this staying visible, to map it as a force that slowly, over time, bends everything to its own shape, to make thinkable the subterranean paths it travels in time and space – that’s her project.
Time during no-sleep nights doesn’t feel evenly spread, it’s a clot, a thickening, your hands get sticky touching it. Touch it.
Chapter 1: 1945— Chapter 2: 1989— Chapter 3: 2015—
She was born two years after Chernobyl, a year before my family left (those 1989 border crossings en masse, didn’t they feel epic then and don’t they feel middle-ofthe-road now?)
She was born two years after Chernobyl, except ‘after’ is a misnomer. Chernobyl was always there while she was growing up, like an empty chair at a dinner table no one sits in (out of reverence? habit? superstition? grief?) – like an empty chair no one would collapse into ever, not even by accident. And then she was in Japan when Fukushima happened. (What are the chances?) She says she knew what to do when the news came through. Do we hold knowledge like contaminated ground holds radiation, its invisibility proportionate to its strength? Which is to say, do we hold it dispersed, always throbbing across generations (never still), sipping through, spreading, getting into all living things but never able to be pinpointed?
Middle-of-theroad crosscountry walking, the Refugee Olympics: families with plastic bags containing the entirety of their possessions walking across the nations of Europe. (I can no longer read about flaneurs and flaneuses; that’s that. Walking as an art practice is dead to me.)
I think, ‘Oh, she’s a baby artist’ – but that’s a prethought. That’s before I meet her.
Prethought Postmemory Foreknowledge
Pinpoint it.
PPE, FFS!
(From a random primary school encyclopedia: ‘When water droplets get too heavy to stay suspended in the cloud, they fall to Earth as rain.’)
When the rain started, my mother (I am now the age she was then) poked her tongue out and said, ‘Ahhhh. So sour!’ We were kayaking, camping, out in the wild (such as it was), no idea what was happening, not a clue about men in short-sleeved shirts sent to fix the exploding nuclear reactor. The wind first blew in the direction of Scandinavia, then Kyiv – no. The wind first blew north-east towards Moscow. The Soviet pilots were ordered to intercept and turn the clouds onto the rural Belarus, where they bore down onto the ground as giant ladles of a ‘radioactive soup’.
Rain! I remember rain. Except in my mind, the radioactive rain on my mother’s tongue circa 1986 merged with another time, several years later, when we (mum, dad, I) saw giant mushrooms in one of the Baltic forests. Mushrooms don’t grow that high. Ever. I was my middle son’s age then. How is it that everyone my family’s given birth to has (so far) only one head?
what? people don’t taste rain where you come from?
Do certain kinds of artists (artists like her) carry knowledge like wind carries clouds?
A fugitive thought half-way through a sleepless night…
Accident of birth. Stanislava P.: 1988 Maria T.: 1974 Place: Kharkiv, Ukraine (formerly the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic)
She often directs herself to the ground. Measures it, collects it, archives it, revisualises it through data. She got to the Calais camp just in time to salvage some of the soil. Salvaging it meant preserving the disappeared camp’s material culture – the remnants of toothbrushes, erasers, SIM cards, shells, electronics. Recentring the ground. Alexievich, our shared touchstone on Chernobyl, writes, ‘The leaves in city parks were raked up, taken out of town, and buried. The ground was cut out of contaminated areas and buried, too – earth was buried in the earth.’ The same with Fukushima. The earth in the earth. She was born two years after Kharkiv’s central train station became filled with people sleeping on the floor, children travelling by themselves (I didn’t know the expression ‘unaccompanied minors’ then) wearing backpacks, sent by their families to safety (such as it was). ‘These scenes were just like from the wartime’, my father would tell me. In explaining in some interview # 346 how she came up with the idea of ‘postmemory’, Marianne Hirsch (poor Marianne!) said, ‘There was a moment in the 1980s when I first began to wonder why certain stories that my parents had told me, or scenes they had evoked about what they always referred to as “the war,” were more vibrant and more vivid in my memories than moments I recalled from my own childhood.’ Well before Ukraine and Russia being at war became, inconceivably, the way things are, Alexievich wrote, ‘At heart we’re built for war. We’ve never known anything else…’
During those twilight Chernobyl days when no one was allowed to know anything, the bees of Chernobyl lived in a postcatastrophic future while the rest, us, lived in
Make it thinkable.
Just in time.
Preknowledge Postmemory
‘I first began this exact work in 2015 in response to the beginning of the civil war in Ukraine. It was definitely not something that I expected to see in my lifetime, and at the time, it felt like a rupture in every way.’
the pre-catastrophic past. An old beekeeper told Alexievich, ‘The bees knew.’ No bee of his came out for days after the reactor went in flames.
‘A sting, a cut, a little hole…’
Don’t come out.
‘The punctum of a photograph is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).’ — Roland Barthes
So we are walking around (does it matter where?) and she says ‘here, this is my favourite bit of this building’ and what she’s pointing to is a dirty-seeming indentation in a wall – the material record, she says, of people leaning against this precise bit of wall to listen to each other. The wall holds history by virtue of its plaster being discoloured and subtracted from – and this history is kind of invisible but not really, and this history is of connections and dailiness. I touch the wall to touch time, as she watches. Touch it.
When we meet, she says photojournalism can’t handle disaster or war, not anymore anyway. Which is to say, I take it, the prick of the photograph is gone, the cut, the bruise. Gone. The mimetic, the lens can’t hack it. To puncture is to make visible what is beyond the threshold of visibility, to make visible that threshold of visibility itself. I search for a photograph of the Second World War Memorial Complex in Kharkiv’s forest park. The way she talks about it, I need to see it again. Of course I went there, but the memory of that visit (perhaps more than one?) is a soapy blur. Plenty of photos online though. In the middle of the memorial complex is a 12.75m statue of Mother (yes, the endlessly reappropriated, wheeled-out figure of a grieving, witnessing Mother). The statue has a beating heart. She says reverberations from that beating heart, sound vibrations travelling low to ground, quietly transform the whole area. I read later that the recording of the heartbeat used in the statue came from a patient recovering from their second heart attack. As recorded by their cardiologist.
‘In my work, I look for the last point of legibility.’
‘This heart has been beating through all this shit. And it’s still a woman’s heart.’
Warning: long quotes (plural) below.
Nixon, Rob Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor Harvard University Press 2011
Rob Nixon: ‘Violence is customarily conceived as an event that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence ... incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales.’
Slow violence: ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’.
Dispersed not just across time and space, but across bodies too, Nixon says, giving an example of ‘chemical and radiological violence’ ‘driven inward’, ‘somatized into cellular dramas of mutation that – … – remain largely unobserved, undiagnosed, and untreated.’
‘I like to draw with nothing. To make work by subtracting, not by adding.’
‘What happens if you take away every trick in the book, if you rob yourself of it.’
‘My motto is simple rules, complex outcomes.’
The Archaeology of Loss by Rachel Ciesla The white is just a means of exposing other elements. White enables other things to become visible. — Henry Roy [It was] a new landscape, a possible horizon, a place of rest and absolute beauty. Waiting for the right viewer willing and needing to be moved to a place of the imagination…That gesture was all we needed to rest, to think about the possibility of change. This showed the innate ability of an artist proposing to make this place a better place. How truly revolutionary. — Felix Gonzales-Torres on Roni Horn’s ‘Gold Field’ (1980-82), coming across the work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 19901 Flora, fauna, land, people, culture, ideas. Rubbing up against each other. Becoming in the relational state of the border. A formation constituted by material and immaterial bodies, themselves porous and permeable, isolating and exclusionary, simultaneously fragile and increasingly monolithically terrible. Situated in this border terrain and taken as a whole, the work of Stanislava Pinchuk appears as an archaeology of loss. It is a study beginning with the ongoing crisis in Pinchuk’s home country of Ukraine, and which travels with her, as she evocatively traces the relationship between meaning and non-meaning within landscapes drastically altered, and permanently marked by conflict and catastrophe. In doing so, each drawing, sculpture, and photograph made by Pinchuk speaks to personal and collective histories of cultural displacement, whilst wrestling with the material and immaterial costs of conflict. The Archaeology of Loss foregrounds Pinchuk’s embodied mapping of the new perceptual, affective and geo-political states associated with, and generated by the mediation of (im)perfect information concerning natural and human-made emergencies.2 Performing the roles of artist, archaeologist and cartographer, Pinchuk independently surveys the ground of each site, collecting data on the landscape’s physical features – its landforms, vegetation, buildings and weather; but also the abstract – the meanings, uses and political boundaries embedded in each place. Throughout this navigation of habitation and movement across geographical and cultural landscapes as disparate as Ukraine, France and Japan, Pinchuk also considers the politics of memory – data storage in the form of physical artefacts and ruins, as witness and testament to traumatic events. Asking in the quietest, but most insistent, of voices how might we better understand the role of trauma and place in the formation of individual and collective memory, and the persistence force with which each continues to shape human experience. To maintain focus and refuse the concealment of trauma in an increasingly interconnected world, the artist must mobilise the knowability of the local, whilst simultaneously disclosing the networked detachments through which such violence propagates. In Pinchuk’s drawings, each piece of topographic data collected from various sites of major tragedies is immaculately hammered dot-by-dot into pristine whiteness. Creating silence and space for the reverberation of loss to become a tangible presence in itself; her drawings bring the unseen realities of war and disaster within sensory range. Because of this, her work is not only a register of absence, but a marker of the otherwise invisible. Each drawing is a constellation of data points composed by their linings, the edges of the page, and the emptiness contained within each pinhole. In doing so, Stanislava Pinchuk is an image-maker, an artist who gives shape and form to sensations which so often lie inside the fringes of (or evade) human perception. On viewing Pinchuk’s data-maps of the toxic topographies of Chernobyl and Fukushima, we recognise how the violence of nuclear disaster is neither confined to the past nor to the human. In her series of pin-point drawings Fallout (2016), the new landscape topographies, created by the removal of radioactive topsoil in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone, are meticulously rendered as the rippling fish nets she saw baking in the sun and found tightly tangled beneath her feet. The most severe nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the radioactive fallout of the 2011 meltdown contaminated the air, soil and waterways of Japan. Pinchuk’s tightly twisted netted forms reproduce the tension, frustration and exhaustion of the decontamination operation – of putting an entire landscape into bags, like you can contain something like that.3 Through translating these contoured surfaces into a record of the new terrains created by the repetitive and painstaking removal of radioactive topsoil in 3 In a text message sent to I.S. on the 15th January 2016, Pinchuk recalled: “I keep thinking about when we first got out of the car in Fukushima, and right at my feet were those fish nets drying on the ground, tracing the topography of the dead earth. That’s exactly what the whole nuclear evacuation zone felt like. This huge operation, putting an entire landscape into bags, like you can contain something like that. But it was just fallout, falling out through the holes.” – Stanislava Pinchuk, Fukushima (Paris: La Chambre Éditions, 2017).
Fukushima, Pinchuk brings the porous, permeable and profoundly physical states of contamination and containment that accompany and alter both human and more-than-human activity into sharp alignment. Similarly, to produce her six-panel drawing Sarcophagus (2017), Pinchuk travelled to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in 2016 to survey the permanent effects of nuclear trauma upon this post-human landscape.4 In doing so, she measured the current radiation levels of raw earth at the Sarcophagus built over Reactor 4, plotting this data against readings from concrete laid before and after 1986. This information was then woven by her into a tapestry; part bridal veil and funerary shroud, moving us to consider how the fallout of distant events can come to rest on our skin and touch our lives in the most intimate of ways. As these tactics and terrains indicate, Pinchuk is an artist whose works speak to the still reverberating fractures of our time. Even so, we must also note that she brings to new consciousness an existing commitment to representing the traumatic rupturing of place and its ensuing tears in the fabric of collective memory. In doing so, she joins a cadre comprised of diverse creators; writers Milan Kundera, Édouard Glissant, and Olga Tokarczuk, along with artists like Banu Cennetoğlu, Julie Gough, Anselm Keifer and Richard Mosse. In relation to Pinchuk’s work, Keifer resonates with special significance, insofar as his practice offers an imposing sense of the inescapable presence of the devastation of history, creating landscapes composed of data that is not associated with categories of beauty and repose but of death, suffering and political force. Made of ash, lead and steel his works are heavily material hauntings that refuse to leave the wound alone.5 In doing so, he makes a case for pain to be a constituent element of any kind of place-making after the horror of the First and Second World Wars. Building on the broken earth of the battlefields and burial grounds, the weight of his work is an analogue for the guilt of the German people and for the transformative impact of these events on the world. Decades later, Pinchuk’s work occupies the same realm, but operates across a far more dispersed set of conflict zones and their sites of mediation. Her work requires a lightness of touch to address the affectless dimensions of information over-and-underload that refuse, and indeed foreclose, mourning. Despite Pinchuk’s necessary differences with Keifer, the border remains the connective formation that brings the traces of life into sharp relief. As Keifer says: There is a special border, the border between art and life that often shifts deceptively. Yet, without this border, there is no art. In the process of being produced, art borrows material from life, and the traces of life still shine through the completed work of art. But, at the same time, the distance from life is the essence, the substance of art. And, yet, life has still left its traces. The more scarred the work of art is by the battles waged on the borders between art and life, the more interesting it becomes.6 Pinchuk’s practice unfolds in a near constant filtering of the immediate and mediated layers of information that are stratified in the slow violence of global and local events. And so, despite the initially reserved feel of Pinchuk’s translation of ostensibly neutral information, it is a highly emotive experience. Like the cool presentations of On Kawara before her, she demonstrates that there can be no plain presentation of facts.7 This is apprehended in her choice of media and techniques; in the highly 4 In toxic environments there is a politics of invisibility that sustainsthe slow violence that is enacted upon the land’s inhabitants. In Chernobyl, the effects ofnuclear trauma are gradual, sedimented and attritional (invisible) but also embodied and understood (visible) by the people who either never left or have sincereturned, and continue to interact with this landscape. For further discussion of the gradual brutalities that communities living in contaminated landscapes experience see: Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (London: Harvard University Press, 2011). 5 The wound refers to Germany’s fraught relationship with the memory of World War II, and the persistent challenge of how to treat representations of the remembered past at a time when such memories are mostly mediated through images. – For a comprehensive account of Anselm Keifer’s work see Andreas Huyssen, ‘Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth,’ October 48 (1989): 25-45. 6 Anselm Kiefer, ‘Acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade’ in Anselm Kiefer: next year in Jerusalem, exhibition catalogue (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2011), 201. 7 The aesthetic and intent of Pinchuk’s project also shares ground with that of Agnes Martin and On Kawara. Like theirs, her score-driven outputs and notations are explicit translations of information across tonal and conceptual registers that purport connections between them. In Kawara’s Date Paintings, Pinchuk’s pin-point drawings, and Martin’s grids, we are immersed in the artist’s exacting devotion to formal tools and facts but more so, it is through stillness that we experience ‘a resistance to the destructive human behaviour that had led to war and devastation.’ Or rather as Agnes Martin more lyrically described: [art] is not about facts, it’s about feelings. It’s about remembering feelings and happiness .. [art] makes concrete our most subtle emotions. – Leslie Satin, ‘Georges Perec and On Kawara: Endotic Extravagance i n Literature, Art, and Dance,’ Literary Geographies 3, no 1 (2017): 50-68. – Stuart Morgan, ‘On Kawara: The Recording Angel,’ Frieze 33 (March/April 1997): 54-57.
autobiographical nature of each body of work, tied to her upbringing in Ukraine within a family of beekeepers and lace-makers, and her close-up experience of data mapping each site and painstakingly analysing their changing topographies. Pinchuk’s tapestries and textiles are spatiotemporal capsules: a crack in the pavement of Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the reverberation of a bomb in Mariupol, a tent pole pitched into the earth of the Calais ‘Jungle’ migrant camp, or the hiding holes dug into steep hills by those attempting to cross the English Channel. Though separated by thousands of kilometres from the site of the initial event, their presence in each artwork ravels and unravels the threads of time and space. Such details are redolent in her series Borders (2018), in which the macro and micro topographies created by the final eviction and demolition of the Calais Jungle in 2016 are reconfigured as traditional Calais lace borders, while the accompanying series of terrazzo sculptures preserve and distil the last twenty kilograms of camp objects – including buttons, cable ties, kiosk tiles, razors, shoes, shotgun shells, SIM cards, tent poles and toothbrushes – trampled into the ground during the forced evacuation. The power of Borders stems from Pinchuk’s ability to move us toward an embodied, interactive confrontation with these brutal truths, changing our perception of the ways landscapes hold and affectively shape our memories of violence and disaster. Considering the time, labour and resources that go into maintaining borders (and border protection), the totality of this exhibition offers an exhaustive narrative of the border and sovereign nations, of separation and displacement. As these symbolically cohere in this gallery space, The Archaeology of Loss becomes a visual marathon, in light of the time and labour that went into producing each body of work – a mirror to the labour of border making, holding and corrupting. The durational nature of Pinchuk’s work has a specific humanist intent. They are staged as quietenings, an opening of a frame of encounter so as to make the viewer more aware of both the individual that is slowly making the work and those individuals, ecologies and ways of existence that have been lost. The hand of the artist is both seen and unseen. Present yet removed. Questioning the visibility of artist labour and more so, how we situate ourselves as viewers, or rather, unwitting participants within this volatile economy of life and death? What and who do we leave behind? It is a question sadly indicative of our times, as french philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi notes: Faced with this economy of violence, huge dumping grounds have been established where unneeded populations, deemed useless, are condemned to live. Whole expanses have become zones of infra-life. The globe is riddled with holes, haunted by shadows, dispossessed of the minimum required to satisfy vital needs.8 In this manner, Pinchuk can be seen to work in the region of what Paul Virilio recognises as an ‘aesthetics of disappearance’.9 The shift from wars fought on battle fronts to warfare conducted from desks at distance has accentuated and accelerated conflict’s immaterial aspects and in doing so, posited information as the key terrain of terror. No longer limited to physical territory or discrete events, conflict now distends into ‘pure war’ that is enacted in a state of infinite preparation.10 Living in a modern world of generalised information is equivalent to life during wartime, where a hack or data breach in one part of the system reverberates across its entirety. As evidenced by the 2017 Russian NotPetya assault in the interconnected domain of cyberspace, an attack directed at Ukraine can also strike at the Danish headquarters of international shipping conglomerate Maersk, paralysing their operations and inflicting damage across the global economy. Accordingly, the immaterial costs of war might be far greater and more insidious than we realise, as they shape global consciousness without our attunement to it. As a responsive echo and framing of this, each of Pinchuk’s works transmits the feeling of standing on fragile ground. And in making visible the incremental, imperceptible or obscured violence of the contemporary era, we the viewer become acutely aware of the ease with which this can be pulled from underneath. This is not limited to the assumed solidity of territory, but above too, as Pinchuk draws attention to the totalising atmospherics of conflict. For instance, the series of drawings Surface To Air (2015) charts geographical relationships between conflict sites, annotating associated sonic eruptions that transformed the spatial experience of the region during the first year of the Ukrainian crisis. Pinchuk’s obliquely formal data-mapping of this crisis is rendered ambiguous as it takes the form of a cascading cloth that evokes the way these events continue to hover and fold into the land and sky, and the bodies and minds of the area’s inhabitants. Pinchuk thereby opens up many questions regarding a period of history that is difficult to comprehend. One which continues to shape 8 Nadia Yala Kisukidi, ‘Geopolitics of the Diaspora,’ trans. Gila Walker, e-flux journal 114 (December 2020). 9 Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2009). 10 Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War, trans. Mark Polizzotti and Brian O’Keeffe (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 1998).
us but in ways that are increasingly difficult to define. We know the world is different and that old modes of understanding do not work, but in what ways? As Pinchuk’s work shows us, mapping is one register of comprehension. The world’s information networks are now so detailed as to allow a Borgesian one-to-one scale mapping of the earth. As abstractions and reality therefore blur into doppelgängers of each other, we might become walled off from ourselves and our neighbours, rather than confront the impossibility of separating real from fake. The fantasy of the perfect map is a horror we cannot, and should not bear, and in many senses it is this horror that Pinchuk holds at bay. For Laura Lo Presti, the necropolitical landscape of migration control is a terraqueous stage; a map upon which people are (im)mobilised, symbolised, and mediated as ‘bodies or points, stories or numbers, moving subjectivities or geometric lines.’11 Within this framework identified by Presti, Pinchuk’s cartographic resurfacing of the Calais Jungle – her mapping of the camp’s architectural remnants and razed surface – reveals the tragic consequences of state-enacted border politics and evidences the ‘repressed topographies of cruelty’ that are silenced by populist antimigration narratives.12 By manipulating the narratological energies embedded in both maps and mapping, Pinchuk demonstrates the evocative power of the map in the context of traumatic events.13 Her critical engagement with the Calais Jungle and its expelled inhabitants not only equips the viewer with a tool for navigating this perilous terrain, but also memorialises the 17 year existence of this former camp along the Rue de Garennes, as testament to the failures of Europe’s mobility policies and its politics of letting die. Practicing in this evocative and critical way, Pinchuk demonstrates a sophisticated awareness of how the image, at the end of the 20th century, was tasked with restoring ‘the nonsequential energy of lived, historical memory and subjectivity as fundamental components of meaning in representation.’14 Her work contributes to the larger cultural and historical labour that was identified by Edward Said in 1982, as it connects the ‘more politically vigilant forms of interpretation to an ongoing political and social praxis.’15 This unification of awareness and action is undertaken as a means of freeing us from the hopeless immobility from being over-informed, or the bemused awareness of desensitisation. Obviously, this task plays out against and within the systems of neoliberalism, and Pinchuk acknowledges her complicity by not cultivating her own garden despite them. But if Said is right in his conviction that ‘culture works very effectively to make invisible and even “impossible” the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship, on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force, on the other’, then where, or when, do we rest our heads? There are no easy answers. Pinchuk practices with an understanding that cultural and political systems are always held in states of dynamic tension, and accordingly, her work speaks to (and with so many contemporary artists) the multiplicity of strategies for coping and for transformation in this moment of uncertainty. Information is not equally distributed. Neither is uncertainty equally experienced. To manoeuvre this ambiguous environment we might consolidate, expand or create new spaces to mourn, plot change, gather one’s optimism and prepare for battles on new fronts daily – to chart a new course and navigate this state of permanent transition with adaptive and unique constellations of actors, trajectories and affects.16 The work of Pinchuk makes visible not only the suppressed and repressed but the techniques of erasure itself as a new politico-aesthetic category. From within these critical and emotive parameters, she opens space for a hushed and necessary re-constellation of trauma-perception; a sensory mode that occupies ground between witnessing, readying, the past and the present.
11 Laura Lo Presti, ‘Like a Map Over Troubled Water: (Un)mapping the Mediterranean Sea’s Terraqueous Necropolitics,’ e-flux Journal 109 (May 2020). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/109/330800/like-a-mapover-troubled-water-un-mapping-the-mediterranean-sea-s-terraqueousnecropolitics/. Necropolitics is the use of Foucauldian biopower to define how some people may live and how others must die within a postcolonial system. In Australia this is exemplified by the disproportionately high incarceration rates of Indigenous people, the offshore detention centres in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, and the persistent marginalisation of already precarious social groups. For a critical analysis of this term and its functioning in liberal democracies see Cameroonian scholar Achille – Mbembe’s Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Edward W. Said, ‘Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community’ in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (London: Granta Books, 2013): 154. 15 Ibid., 155. 16 Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition,’ Research in African Literatures 34, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 57-82.
stanislava pinchuk The Archeology of Loss, Fremantle Art Centre, 24 July – 07 September 2021
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Collections Gallery
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Fremantle Arts Centre is situated at Walyalup on Whadjuk Nyoongar Boodjar. We acknowledge the Whadjuk people as the traditional owners and custodians of these lands and waterways and extend our respect to their Elders, past and present.
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We offer our heartfelt gratitude to the Whadjuk community and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who continue to care for Country and share their knowledge – this generosity and wisdom helps us to understand and navigate Country safely and respectfully.
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Kathleen O’Connor Gallery
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Stanislava Pinchuk: The Archaeology of Loss Fremantle Arts Centre, Walyalup 24 07 – 07 09 2021 Photographs by Stanislava Pinchuk Curated by Rachel Cieśla Designed by Ziga Testen Edited by Jaxon Waterhouse © 2021 Stanislava Pinchuk © 2021 for her text Maria Tumarkin © 2021 for her text Rachel Cieśla © 2021 for this edition Fremantle Arts Centre and Heart of Hearts Press All rights are reserved. Apart from any use permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced or communicated to the public by any processes without prior written permission from the publisher.
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Published by
Fremantle Arts Centre is supported by the State Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries. Fremantle Arts Centre 1 Finnerty Street Walyalup/Fremantle, wa fac.org.au and
Heart of Hearts Press Boorloo/Perth and Karratha, wa heartofheartspress.com isbn 978-0-6487040-4-1 Printed in Naarm Special thanks to Maria Tumarkin, Heide Museum of Modern Art and to all the exhibition lenders for their generous support.
stanislava pinchuk Chernobyl, 2016
stanislava pinchuk Chernobyl, 2016
stanislava pinchuk Fukushima, 2015
stanislava pinchuk Fukushima, 2015
stanislava pinchuk Calais, 2017
stanislava pinchuk Calais, 2017
stanislava pinchuk Kharkiv, 2016
stanislava pinchuk Kyiv Maidan, 2019