Everyday routine, tortured by glimpses of stories, is what constitutes a basic description of the following images. We found ourselves in the active realm of creating a conventionally new human. This conventionality has deep roots. Juxtaposing iconological aspects of certain images with the ones preceding them is the key to understand this conventionality. Each of the demonstrated subjects becomes a commentary to how societies build their borders and try to separate themselves from the previous time and regime and, for sure, from other societies. Such attempts aim to maintain the safety, or rather the illusion of it, since it’s about images that are being created for postulating certain principles of identification.
Existing in two systems, with Ukrainian Independence Day in between, we deal with seemingly opposed approaches to forming this symbolic safety. Chronologically, the first one tries to look pioneer-like free of layers left by preceding humanities. On the contrary, the second one aims to find the connection with its past that was cut off by the first approach. What do these both approaches miss while scrutinising each other? Aren’t they drawing from the same source, or worst of all, aren’t they a source for one another?
It’s the form that exposes them, the form they created in order to separate themselves and solidify their differences.
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Yana Bachynska is an artist who works with video, action, installation etc. After all, it’s a specific problem and need that defines the medium. The complex fabric of what’s present in and what’s appropriate to individual and collective experience is the subject of her artistic practice. Lives in Lviv, Kyiv, Szczecin, Katowice.
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