Public art installation, 2021
Digital Artwork, 2022 (exhibition `Colored Lenses: Life among others`)
With the support of European Cultural Foundation
Digital adaptation of the work was presented on the online-exhibition `Colored Lenses: Life among others`, 2022, Contemporary Ukraine Studies Program of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, in partnership with the Karazin Kharkiv National University and YermilovCenter. An offline exhibition suposed to be realised at YermilovCenter in spring, 2022, but was posponed due to the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine
A historical event does not exist until it is visually fixed. Therefore, this is the historical photography that determines the way history would be interpreted.
Memory is infinitely fragile, and its supremacy is destroyed with a single click of a button for the sake of ideologies and censorship. Nowadays, when everyone could create or publicize any image on social media, the control over history may be lost. Realizing this risk, the authorities have created an algorithm that decides for the user which images are acceptable for viewing, and which are better to hide or delete. Such a dictatorship of the visual is a convenient tool for manipulating historical memory.
Independence Square is one of Ukraine's most important historical sites, which is a national symbol of protest against the dictatorship. It is here where this metal structure is installed as an attempt to capture a history that is dissolving under the pressure of censorship. You could see real screenshots of archival photos of historical events, hidden by the algorithm of the social network as content that potentially contains scenes of violence. It doesn't matter what the historical event is, because memory conflicts are timeless, and ignoring one trauma invariably leads to forgetting others. In this place, each of you could construct the events by yourself and reflect on how the history can be told, organized, and distorted.