Olena Bulygina

Stasis

2010



Stasis is a time anomaly, an artificial pause.

The original building was created in 1936, but finished only after WWII. It was designed to look like experimental plane “Maxim Gorkiy” from above. The plane had only one test flight and crashed during the landing. The building is huge and beautiful, it survived 90’s and was partly renovated in 00’s. It is full of Soviet Union symbols and artefacts along with mining references in design. But, unlike communism and mining industry in Stakhanov — an industrial town in eastern Ukraine, where all mines were shut down in 1998, it is still functioning.

This story is not only about anachronism, now the past and present are mixed in weird way, just like social consciousness – 70 years of USSR and two decades of independence in corresponding percent ratio. There are artificial cheap flowers, TV sets, plush curtains and “winter garden” near old soviet symbols of hammer and sickle, there are voting places from 2010 presidential elections, that were set up in the Red Lounge, and red flags from main painted panel were not removed – only faces of Lenin and Stalin were painted over somewhere in mid 90’s.

And this is a deeply personal story: I spent here nearly every day on various after school classes, I remember cracked walls and old armchairs, columns, constant coldness of the low floors and ambience that scared and fascinated me.

When I got back here in 2010 for recognition, it stroke me, how everything was same and wrong.

Pavlo Borshchenko

Catch The Hero

2019 - 2021



I'm originally from a small provincial Ukrainian city and grew up in the context of the end of the Soviet era. It influenced my search for identity, and visual conflicts of shifting epochs affected my consciousness. This project reflects on the theme of layering different ideals and their loss. I study typical characters of the past epoch and try to reimagine them with the lost utopian meanings.

It feels like a game of heroes: I dress up as these idealistic characters I grew up with and try to imagine myself today in these dreamed up roles. But they haven't got power anymore, as it's only a mind game now. This is a post-true story of an inner hero who tries to find himself between the tinsel of the past and present, whose life nowadays is full of the absurdity of abandoning history and twisted values.

Sumy: Sorrow of my days

2018 - 2021



What is 'Soviet' for people who never lived in the Soviet Union?

In this series, I trying to show the view of the Soviet by my generation who was born during the collapse of the USSR.

Nurtured in childhood, this sovietness lives in us. It was formed through continuity in education and the prism of modern propaganda of the entire Soviet. There were no more pioneers, but there were pioneer camps, there was no Lenin in school, but he was still on our squares, there was no cosmos in the news, but it was imaged on badges and stamps.

All these things were the reason for the ongoing formation of a purely Soviet utopian horizon of happiness in the future for new generations on a background of a complete gray and not interesting present.

We are formed in this vein, but now we are faced with the absolute illusory of this horizon, also as the older generations feel the pain of its loss. This sense of utopia's losing was stronger relatively as smaller and most depressing cities were. For me, this is the case explaining the power of using space in ideological propaganda, which is so important in small cities and villages to compensate for the emptiness of the nowadays.

I used my native city name – Sumy - for this series: 'Sumy: Sorrow of my days', as for me it's a good illustration of the depressive place whose has the best time is in the past. In my native language name Sumy consonant with the 'Sorrow' word context.

This is a kind of post-truth of that time based on real artifacts of this era by applying them with new meanings or with elements of 'cargo cult' when nobody knows how to apply it in an original way.

It feels like a game of heroes: I dress up as these idealistic characters I grew up with and try to imagine myself today in these dreamed up roles. But they haven't got power anymore, as it's only a mind game now. This is a post-true story of an inner hero who tries to find himself between the tinsel of the past and present, whose life nowadays is full of the absurdity of abandoning history and twisted values.

Nazar Furyk

Simple Things

2018



I'm attracted to strange and surrealistic things. As a visual pilgrim (in literal and figurative meaning), I try to find or create them in the environment. And thus draw the viewer's attention to the ordered chaos of objects around us, their strange power, and at the same time, incredible fragility.

Valentine Bo

Your next step would be to do the Transmission

2019-2021



I've been working on a project, addressing social aspects such as human conformity, manipulation, pretence and sincerity. These concepts surround us and with varying intensity forming the cores of ideological movements, religious societies and cults. The driving force behind this project was the activity of a UFO-centered Raëlian movement.

The key pursuits of the movement are: raising funds for the construction of the embassy to return the aliens (who created people) to Earth, cloning people, the practice of Sensual Meditation and the provision of sex services by a separate unit of called “Raël's Girls”. In 2002, the leader of the society told the world that they managed to clone the first child, the girl named Eva. Unfortunately, her existence has not been proved.

According to the basic concept of the cult, Raël (the spiritual leader) had a contact with aliens, visited another planet and had his own clone created before his eyes. There he also personally met with the prophets Mohammed, Jesus, Buddha and Moses. Raël has been preaching the information obtained from aliens all around the world for 45 years.

I'm taken by the ability of people faced with estrangement in modern society, to find some kind of transcendence in such cults. Working with a lot of material, I decided to interpret the experience in a visual narrative. I create and utilize sculpture, work with photogrammetry and 3D printing.

In this part of the project, the attention is focused on unsuccessful experiments, the process of creating a clone, fear, masturbation and sexual context. The series is a reinterpretation and my illustration of a world in which sexual emancipation and sci-fi interpretation of the Bible coexist.

The created entourage is the decoration of an imaginary shelter that manipulatively attracts with its utopianism. Photography, in this case as a medium, assumes the authenticity of the depicted, but at the same time occupies an average position between the authenticity of the depicted and the genuineness of its essence.

In the context of the topic, I address the internal conformity of the viewer with words from the Manga Version of Book “Humans Were Created Scientifically”: ‘Your next step would be to do the “Transmission.”’ *