Dmytro Erlikh’s exhibition of imagined post-apocalyptic landscapes and life after catastrophe. Paintings on OSB and a sound installation with a damaged piano transform the museum’s semi-basement into a space between destruction and renewal.
Dmytro Erlikh works with oriented strand board, cutting its outline with a jigsaw, shaping the surface with a grinder and applying colour with a brush. Irregular edges and texture become part of imagined post-apocalyptic landscapes.
Erlikh created the central installation with Illia Petrov. A damaged Ukraina piano, moss and audience seating form a scene of transformation. The sound of individual strings travels through four independent speakers.
Performances by Undo despot and rokurokusuzu accompanied the exhibition. Experimental electronics met the acoustics of the semi-basement, its rough walls and illuminated niches.
The fascination with ruins turns abandoned architecture into an image of a world after humanity. Yet this contemplative pleasure also raises an ethical question: what disappears when buildings become spectacular images and the lives of their inhabitants fall outside the frame? The curatorial text approaches “ruin porn” through this tension between aesthetic attraction and an exploitative gaze.
In Dmytro Ehrlich’s project, architectural fragments and photographic techniques become a language of personal desire and unease. His quiet, detached tone makes ordinary circumstances dramatic. The absence of people is not simply documentary; it is an active construction of a landscape in which the artist confronts a future that seems already determined.
These empty spaces offer an image of our own disappearance while we are still alive. Historical time gives way to geological time: the end of humanity would not be the end of the Earth. The exhibition connects this anticipation with nostalgia for a lost future and the shrinking space of political and personal possibility, returning to the question: who owns death?