Horenka

Autor :

Misha Zavalniy

The idea I have taken is the idea of the scale, the distance or detachment from which we look at certain phenomena. In this case, the way I see the war in Ukraine now, being outside my country due to life circumstances. This perspective, from the very beginning of the war, has given me a sense of a dual reality - subjective and external.

 

This perception is also expressed in my art in two poles: on one hand it makes me as an artist take a political and civic position and "scream" about war and support to my country in its relatively peaceful society; on the other hand it is an attempt to make sense of this state and the danger my relatives, friends and Ukrainian society in general live in. It is an attempt to comprehend war as a phenomenon, as destruction, as a cataclysm which at the same time leads to changes, transformation of society itself. An attempt to imagine a new life that would appear in the place of this destruction.

 

The way nature, as if licking its scars, covers the battlefields with grass, fills craters with water and turns them into lakes so that new life can build up, and society, which is part of this natural process, is also transformed.  I have overlaid this image of nature with the ruins and landscapes of the Ukrainian village of Horenka, suggesting the context and events of a particular time period in a particular place.

 

Despite the distance and the fact that I have never been to that particular village, it is a place as close to me as the places in Ukraine where I grew up, and how the Ukrainian landscape remains in my memory. It is the same nature and the same architecture, the same materials of which these houses are built and the same dining sets on their ruins. So when I look at these ruins I see the ruins of my own home.

 

Through multiple exposures on film I am reinforcing the visual effect of a constant transformation, where a single analogue image of an abstract wildlife, overlaps, invades and destroys the picture of a particular reality. For me, the real, physical aspect of this process also matters. From the outside it looks like creation and the development of a new image and subject, but inside there is a chemical process, the destruction and transformation of matter. Life and the creation that is the driving force behind all phenomena must constantly take on newer and newer forms under different circumstances and time.

Site :

www.mishazavalny.com