A group exhibition examining how sacred imagery, national mythology and militarised symbolism enter contemporary visual culture.
Participants: Nika Bartsykhovska, Yuriy Kobenko, Serhii Melnychenko, Andrii Siguntsov, Anton Slobodeniuk and Nazar Sheshuriak.
For the exhibition, I presented drawings and the digital print They and I, which combines political portraits with fragments of popular digital imagery.
Nazar Sheshuriak conceived Ukrainian Zigafolk. Alongside my collages and drawings were Serhiy Melnychenko’s photographs of Mykolaiv checkpoints, Yurii Kobenko’s My Dog and Sheshuriak’s installations using historical symbols.
The exhibition opened at Bereznitsky Project on 10 October 2014 and was soon closed at the property owner’s request. Gallerist Yevhen Bereznitsky publicly emphasised the project’s critical position towards far-right ideology.
In They and I, political portraits enter a world of interface windows, text, emoji and fragments of digital imagery. I exhibited drawings alongside the digital prints; the gallery brings together individual sheets and photographs of their installation.
Ukrainian Zigafolk explores a “new sacredness” through a collision of national symbols, occult references and the imagery of apocalyptic folk. The term comes from a musical context, carrying associations with militarism, ideological provocation and the reinvention of older myths.
The project assembles an unstable symbolic world: Cossack fantasies, Chornobyl angels, historical figures and bodily imagery coexist in combinations that resist a coherent national picture. Familiar signs become strange, excessive or contradictory. This is an artistic examination of the attraction and unease generated when collective identity takes on a sacred form.
Participating artists were Nika Bartsykhovska, Yuriy Kobenko, Serhii Melnychenko, Andrii Siguntsov, Anton Slobodeniuk and Nazar Sheshuriak. Their different interpretations turn the exhibition into a field of competing images rather than a single statement of belief.