Intervention

‘My generation was born in independent Ukraine. Therefore, I do not know Soviet life, but I observe the wreckage of this empire and the cause-and-effect processes in contemporary cultural scenarios and the functioning of social institutions. Post-Soviet ideology is like a weed that grows through freshly laid asphalt. Where the weed is not completely weed, and the new architecture of ideological superstructures is no less mythologised than before 1991...

My studio is located in a building that used to house production workshops at the Union of Artists of the Ukrainian SSR. Therefore, this project is based on the materials left in the studio by Transcarpathian artists: posters, newspapers, books, models for monumental murals, mosaics, sgraffito, which were made in the interiors and exteriors of Transcarpathia.

I was interested in experiencing a certain state of the time that existed in the art fund's studio during the period of mass spread of Soviet ideology and was preserved in the format of artefacts, often difficult to read correctly. The temporal and socio-cultural distance between the times of ‘stagnation’ and ‘perestroika’ and the present has led to a kind of hybridised forms of reading certain images and symbols in the mass consciousness. The archetypes of heroes and leaders, as well as the correctness of psychosomatic reactions in social communication, have acquired specific characteristics that, through the ironic discourse of postmodernity, have come to the Adornian negation of culture as a system and as a set of value orientations.

Graphic works with artefacts, documents related to the environment and history of the time served as the basis for the creation of these prints. Soviet paints: gouache, enamels, varnishes, which were used to make propaganda posters, served as the main material for me in creating this series of works.

I'm interested in creating my own semiotic language with the help of inherited artefacts of the Soviet past. This is the only connection I have with that reality.

The experience of fear, the feeling of the unknown that affects the general situation of the present, perhaps the consequences of post-Soviet consciousness, or perhaps a certain group of illusions and speculations intended for self-justification.’

The main images in the works: 

‘Man of Muscles’, walking etching by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1540)

‘homo sapiens’ skull of an intelligent man

Redi maid (floor mats, napkins)

Mechanism - when rescuing from a fire in 1897 (which does not perform its function)

Post-Soviet ideology as a weed that grows through freshly laid asphalt

Technique: letterpress, linocut, monotype, prints by the author (P. Bedzyr's machine)

Materials: Soviet gouache, green enamel, German printing spray paint,

fragments cut from Soviet posters and magazines.