"Talking about myself? Talking about you"

Kateryna Vyshneva, Sashko Protiah, Dasha Chechushkova, Kamila Yanar, and the Open Group presented their video works in the exhibition, which in different ways tell about the trauma of the authors, but at the same time - about our collective trauma, as the experience of war. How do artists work with collective trauma?

The exhibition curator, Mykola Ridnyi, explains that individual experiences are lost in a collective catastrophe. Therefore, the group exhibition consists of the personal experiences of the artists who comprise the "collective body". The authors carefully follow the events of different ages and their own emotions associated with them, emphasizing the importance of individual experience in this. In this way, the exhibition organizers allow the audience to grasp as many meanings as possible and feel the polyphony of differences and similarities between Ukrainians.

Artists explore history, memory, and trauma, which are definitely connected to the political context of the past and present. Their videos raise the issue of media representation of the war, challenging ordinary documentation and journalistic commentary.

"Dramatic and tragic, but above all, visually impressive images of explosions, ruins, and the dead, create a canon of documentation of war as a disaster. This collective catastrophe often makes individual experiences invisible and unrecognizable."

In such a situation, is there room for the experiences of an individual person, and can they be heard? The authors emphasize the importance of performative actions as a critical act for personal and collective reflection on the war experience. After all, in this way, they do not create or supplement reality. They are part of it from the beginning.

Artists resort to their canon of war documentation, trying on different roles and using the reformatting of trauma as an artistic method. For example, the work created by Dasha Chechushkova during her stay at an artist residency in Italy draws attention to the issue of remote experience of a military conflict. The video gives the viewer a feeling of claustrophobia. The artist uses the closed space of her workshop to reproduce the landscapes and characters of her inner dreams and memories, erasing and adding them layer by layer. This animation offers a narrative essay about the influence of socio-political context on personality in form of a disturbing essay.

It is worth emphasizing the video work of the Open Group because it was the only one at this exhibition that delegated the execution of the performance to other people. Two women and a man - migrants from the East of Ukraine who found temporary shelter in Lviv - share the painful but familiar experience of life in a city affected by war through the form of symbolic karaoke. The viewer can reproduce the sounds (of automatic fire, explosions from artillery, or the operation of air defense systems) together with the heroes of the video. For this, the organizers placed a microphone in the space. This gesture makes everyone who wants to be an active participant in the performance while simultaneously emphasizing the echoes of one's own experience in another person's experience.

The small scale of the exhibition demonstrated by the project "Talking about myself? Talking about you" is enough to follow and realize the unexpected value of highlighting personal experience in wartime conditions. Moving intuitively or sequentially from one video work to another, we are again convinced that every "story for the sake of history" is essential. Everyone should be heard.

The exhibition will last until July 9, 2023.

The article has been prepared for publication in Kyiv Daily.

The author of the text
Art historian and the art manager of the Imagine Point Gallery
Inna Kalenska