Critical Gallery: UKRAINE (working title)

UKRAINE (working title)
31.10.–30.11.2025

Text by Stanislava Ovchinnikova, curator of the exhibition

“This is not a film about the war”,(1)  proclaims the anonymous author 
in the five-hour-long found footage work Watch War / Смотреть войну (2018). “This is a film about the image of war seen from one’s home.”(2)

I, too, am inclined to begin by refusing the immediately apparent—by 
stating, this is not an exhibition about the war, this is an exhibition 
about appearances that the war makes on the screens, streets, and bodies of those of us far from the frontlines. But to follow through on such an inclination would be to suggest that an arrowhead can strike without a shaft—that is, that contemporary warfare can be held separate from contemporary media. Which is, of course, untrue.(3) It is as crucial as ever to pay attention to the umbilical connection between the war, its mediated sight (a photograph, a video, a text), and the witness of it. Thus, this exhibition speaks of war as it exists today: inseparable from the lens through which one learns to see, or aims to kill.(4)

Ukraine (working title) presents three works by Sasha Kurmaz, Lada 
Nakonechna, and Mykola Ridnyi, created as a reflection on the conditions of life under the war that Russia started in Ukraine in 2014. The artists consider how violence is hidden, distorted, or made perceptible in image, language, body, and the media.

In a video work, State of Emergency (2018), Sasha Kurmaz brings together personal and found documentary footage portraying life in Ukraine during the first four years of the war. Across four channels and forty minutes, we see frontlines, fighting in the Ukrainian parliament, citizens protesting illegal construction, burning churches, exploding cars, and numerous other scenes of everyday brutality—or brutality as it’s becoming the everyday. Here, Kurmaz draws a connection between the war, then unfolding on approximately 10% of Ukrainian territory, and the violence, poverty, and political instability present across the whole of Ukraine, as its consequence. And if you find yourself feeling disoriented trying to follow numerous political events unfolding across the four channels at the same time, all the better. Holding attention on multiple crises without missing a crucial detail is a useful skill to train during wartime.

Still, despite the multiplication of images, much remains unseen. Mykola Ridnyi’s Blind Spot (2014) takes its title from ophthalmology: the small area on the retina that lacks light-sensitive receptors—a gap that in healthy vision goes unnoticed, automatically compensated for by the brain. Ridnyi considers what happens when disease makes this blind spot apparent. Juxtaposing visual distortions caused by conditions such as scotoma or glaucoma with imagery from the war-torn east of Ukraine, he examines how media propaganda similarly impairs our capacity to perceive reality.

And it’s not just vision. Language operates as another filter through 
which we build an understanding of the world. In Lada Nakonechna’s 
installation The So-Called (2015), words—many reminiscent of those 
saturating the media landscape surrounding Ukraine at the time—constitute an integral component of the tools of aggression. By 
making apparent the language’s ability to both obscure and concretize violence, she inspects the role that it plays in the propagation of conflict.

The exhibition’s expanded program includes an invitation to Watch War / Смотреть войну, a found footage film that was published on YouTube in 2018 (https://youtu.be/gdSgzriu89I?si=OPxaR9-dAUUo1XsO). Edited by a person who chose to remain anonymous, the work brings together videos made and uploaded online by 443, similarly unnamed, eyewitnesses—civilians in war-torn regions, soldiers at the frontline—of the 2014–2018 period of the Russian war against Ukraine.

Beyond creating an extensive cinematic document of that time, the editor also formulates a set of critical statements on the role of the camera, montage, and spectatorship in the war. These statements, typed in Russian, are interspersed throughout the film. “This war was started in order to be seen,” one of them reads. “What will happen if we stop watching?”(5)

ENDNOTES:

(1) Translation into English by Stanislava Ovchinnikova. Original text, 
in Russian, reads: Это не фильм о войне. (Anonymous. Смотреть войну [Watch war]. 2018. Youtube, https://youtu.be/gdSgzriu89I?si=3dvCxRGIgP8E7TYx. 2:09:57)

(2) Translation into English by Stanislava Ovchinnikova. Original text, 
in Russian, reads: Это фильм о том, какой можно увидеть войну, оставаясь дома. (Anonymous. Смотреть войну [Watch war]. 2018. Youtube, https://youtu.be/gdSgzriu89I?si=3dvCxRGIgP8E7TYx. 2:10:24)

(3) For the contextually relevant discussion on the role of media in 
hybrid warfare (often deployed by Russia), see.: Rácz, András. Russia’s 
Hybrid War in Ukraine: Breaking the Enemy’s Ability to Resist. Finnish 
Institute of International Affairs, 2015, https://fiia.fi/en/publication/russias-hybrid-war-in-ukraine.

(4) The same film, Watch war (2018), does a brilliant job making this 
connection apparent by, for example, superimposing cinematic terms— “панорамирование/точка сьемки/shot/средний план/соотношение 
сторон/zoom/видоискатель/внутрикадровый монтаж/глубина кадра” [“panning, camera position, shot, medium shot, aspect ratio, zoom, viewfinder, intra-frame montage, depth of field”—transl. S. Ovchinnikova] onto the footage of a targeting process done through a display inside a tank. (Anonymous. Смотреть войну [Watch war]. 2018. Youtube, https://youtu.be/gdSgzriu89I?si=3dvCxRGIgP8E7TYx. 2:32:05-2:34:13)

(5) Translation into English by S. Ovchinnikova. Original text, in 
Russian, reads: Эта война начата для того чтобы быть увиденной. Что 
произойдет, если мы перестанем смотреть? (Anonymous. Смотреть войну [Watch war]. 2018. Youtube, https://youtu.be/gdSgzriu89I?si=3dvCxRGIgP8E7TYx. 3:04:00-3:04:24)