Mykola Ridnyi, Grey Horses, film still, 2016“I want to say something about this situation without repeating the violence”, says Mykola Ridnyi – Ukrainian multi-media artist, who dedicated much of his artistic research to the question of how and how not to respond and represent images of conflicts. Carefully, his films, installations and public art works address states and histories of violence – especially the Russian war against Ukraine – through poetic moving images, fictional narratives or non-linear montages. His works were shown in various international exhibitions, such as at La Biennale di Venezia, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, daad galerie Berlin, Transmediale in Berlin, ZKM Karlsruhe, Museum for Modern Art in Warsaw and Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm. In April and May 2022, Mykola and I had two video calls between Berlin and Ukraine, followed by jointly editing the interview according to the situation of his country and his hometown Kharkiv. As opposed to Springtime, when Mykola had to find shelter in Lviv and could not leave the country, he is now able to travel to his exhibitions and currently spends a residency at the Quadriennale di Roma in Italy. In our conversation, we spoke about his theory that relates the science of vision to the perception of war, about how media enforces a voyeuristic addiction to images of violence and about the current situation for Ukrainian artists.
Interview part I, 12.04.2022, Berlin - Lviv
ALW
Mykola, how are you doing?
MR
I am ok now and safe in Lviv, to where I fled and found temporary home. Also my parents are safe now. I am originally from Kharkiv – the city that has been attacked right from the start. Since 2017 I have been living in Kyiv, which used to be a place of international transit – almost impossible to believe now. A few days ago, I went to Bucha with Polish filmmakers, a suburb from Kiev, and saw the massacre that has happened there. I talked to the people and heard what they experienced during the Russian occupation. I am not yet sure how this experience will affect me and my practice.
ALW
Does the war allow you and your colleagues any mental or physical space to continue making art?
MR
Right now it is hard, if not impossible to make art. I feel like I need more distance to reflect on what is happening, and what this means for the future. It is hard to predict, of course, but I am pessimistic about a quick end of this war.
ALW
How has the art scene in Ukraine responded to the war so far?
MR
Many people have fled, of course. But both outside and inside the Ukraine, I currently experience the art scene is a space of solidarity. In the safer regions there are small gatherings, and some art spaces, such as the one where I am currently living, hosting people who have lost their homes or who are not safe there.
Mykola Ridnyi, NO! NO! NO!, film stills, 2017
ALW
Are there cultural events still taking place?
MR
Not much, but here, in Lviv, there are small events, such as readings, screenings and discussion groups. I also have been screening some of my films, such as “NO! NO! NO!” (2017). The film follows a group of young people from Kharkiv, who experience the breakout of the war in the neighbouring Lihansk and Donetsk regions. The film shows how the proximity to the war affects each of the characters and their activities. After the screenings we have conversation about the work and the situation in our country. Many displaced people from Kharkiv, Mariupol and other Eastern parts of Ukraine came and expressed their experience. This community is important for all of us.
ALW
How do you think the art scene in Ukraine might change after this war?
MR
First of all, it’s important to mention that there was a big development of new culture institutions in Ukraine for the last 8 years. Among them are Ukrainian Culture Foundation, Ukrainian Institute, Dovzhenko Cinema Archive/Museum of Cinema and others. There was also process of culture decentralization: many of art activities appeared in Ukrainian regions. Russian aggression in 2022 destroyed a lot of urban infrastructure and residential areas. We will need to rebuild the country after this war. It’s hard to say if the state will be available to continue support culture institutions in such terrible conditions. But Ukrainian artists know what is self-organization and will use this skill event without any support. As for the international visibility of Ukrainian art, I think, there will be more and more of its presence worldwide.
ALW
You have addressed the conflicts in the East of Ukraine and the threat of a war, since the first occupation in 2014. How do you feel about the increased interest in your work?
MR
Generally speaking, it feels a bit cynical that many international art institutions give large visibility to representatives of certain art scenes only when we facing political catastrophe. My work was related to all these growing problems for a long time, but probably it was not a political trend. Nonetheless, I am using any opportunity to bring an attention to the Russian war against Ukraine and collect donations to support Ukrainian people.
ALW
The shocking politics of images in this war have played a major role in how much the world responded to Ukraine’s situation, as well as their outreach for help and military support. How has this been perceived from inside Ukraine?
MR
These images are horrifying, but it is even more affective to see it with your own eyes like I did in Bucha. It’s a small town, but there are larger cities like Mariupol where the scale of destruction and loss of people’s life’s is incomparable. We see less images from there because it’s hard and dangerous to access. Recently Lithuanian documentary filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravicius was killed in Mariupol. We can only imagine how many war crimes Russian army committed there. Not only visual but also verbal evidence spread the feeling of compassion to victims but also large wave of hatred towards aggressors. The Ukrainian attitude towards not only Putin but Russian society will be only as contempt to the enemy after this. The images played a major role to influence Western political decisions to support Ukraine. But if that support would be provided earlier, probably lots of tragic events would not have happened. If the West would take Russian threat in 2014 more seriously and reacted accordingly, maybe there would be no invasion to Ukraine in 2022.
ALW
Do you think that art can provide a forum of resistance or investigation during a war?
MR
One could argue: what art can say when the artillery shouting? But art operates not on the military, but culture front. In fact, Ukrainian art scene exist in such condition for the last 8 years. Many of my works created in this period reflected the ongoing war. Unfortunately, art had no power to prevent the catastrophic events. Now it can spread knowledge about this war internationally and it might play a therapeutic role for the audience, especially among Ukrainian refugees locally.
Mykola Ridnyi, Temerari, film trailer, 2020
ALW
Your work “Temerari” (2020) addresses how the Ukrainian far right movement have been inspired by the aesthetics of the Italian Futurist movement. How do you feel about this work, now that the Russian propaganda has instrumentalised the argument of a “denazification” to invade and attack Ukraine?
MR
“Temerari” is an essay film from 2019. I spent a few months at the Villa Serpentara in Olevano Romano, a village close to Rome. It was a time filled with contrasting impressions of relaxing nature, good cuisine and wine and the intense political events taking place around us. Full scale Russian invasion today is a continuation of the war in Donbas that began in 2014. This war revealed more connections between Ukraine and Italy than one could imagine. Italy at the time was experiencing a parliamentary crisis provoked by the far-right populist Matteo Salvini. At the same time, the Ukrainian National Guard sergeant Vitaliy Markiv was sentenced to 17 years on suspicion of killing the Italian journalist Andrea Rocchelli and his Russian translator Andrei Mironov during military actions in eastern Ukraine. The case looked controversial and politically motivated: The Italian press had often called Markiv a neo-Nazi, and this perfectly matched Salvini's course of building close connections to Russia. However, the Italian crisis ended with the resignation of Salvini as Deputy Prime Mininster. A year after later, Markiv was fully acquitted by the court and released from jail.
In the same period of I learned of a parallel investigation by the Italian police into the network of Italian mercenaries and recruiters for the war in Ukraine. At the time, none of them had been detained. While some had entrenched themselves within the power structures of the “DPR / LPR” republics, others disappeared without a trace. Stories about “Ukrainian neo-Nazis” often appear in the European press. But we have to be aware that this is the same rhetoric used by Putin to justify his attack on Ukraine. I will not deny the presence of radical right-wingers in Ukraine, but their number is not bigger than among supporters of the “Russian world” or among Italian tifosi. However, the activity of the Italian mercenaries (described in my film) shows that when it comes to the issue of Ukraine, the right-wing radicals of various countries find themselves on opposite sides of the frontline. The character of Ukrainian nationalism is different than Russian. While Russian ideology is imperialistic, Ukrainian is liberating – its goal to save Ukraine as a sovereign and democratic country and prevent its transformation in totalitarian state like Russia.
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Interview part II, Berlin - Kiev, 19.05.2022
Mykola Ridnyi, Shelter, installation view, GfZK Leipzig, 2015
ALW
Are your works stored safely, or are they threatened to be demolished?
MR
I had many objects stored in Kharkiv, most of which have been transported and are now stored safely. This was a risky transport. Ironically, some of the objects which were saved were small bomb shelter models for a project of mine called “Shelter” (2012), which was shown in the Ukrainian pavilion at the Venice biennial back in 2013. Concrete models were accompanied by two films. One addressed the shelter in my parents’ garden from soviet times and the other introduces an underground shelter repurposed as a school delivering pre-training to military service.
ALW
Have you visited Kharkiv after the attacks?
MK
No, but I'm planning to go there soon to check the condition of my house and to film a little bit. Russian troops were pulled back closer to the state border although Kharkiv is just 40 km away from there. It’s kind of safer now. They can however still use rockets and air jets. I want to film the streets Kharkiv, but I need to wait for the accreditation from the Ukrainian military.
ALW
Do you already know what you will use the film material for?
MK
It's related to an older work called „Regular Places“ that I filmed in Kharkiv. Some of the locations appearing in the film were heavily damaged. I will add a final part of this old film to update it, as it will be shown in some exhibitions soon.
ALW
Can you explain what the film “Regular Places” is about?
MK
In 2014 I filmed several public spaces in the city of Kharkiv, where there were confrontations between Ukrainian and pro-Russian activists, leading to scenes of violence and punishment. These were horrible and shaking events for the city, especially in this direct confrontation between people. Some scenes were also largely distributed in the media flow. I wanted to say something about this situation, without repeating the violence. For the work I filmed various places after the situation calmed down and added the sound from various violent videos that I found online. You can feel the violence still being in the air, influencing the life of the city. You cannot really figure if the past is finished or if it's still present, even less how it will influence the future. That’s exactly what happened: after life pretend to be peaceful and calm the war arrived in an enormously bigger scale, with a different level of destruction.
Mykola Ridnyi, Regular Places, film still, 2015 / 2022
ALW
You just said you want to talk about the violence without repeating the images of violence, and I know this challenge has been one of the main focuses within your artistic practice for some time. During a residency in Innsbruck, you even organised a conference called “Seeing through the affects of violence.” After all the research you have done so far, how do you suggest responding to images of violence?
MR
It's a good but also a complicated question. I didn't conclude. A thought from the Ukrainian journalist Natalia Gumenyuk, who talked at our panel in Austria, got stuck in my mind: She argued that art has a privilege not afraid to be boring and unclear. It also stands in contrast to the journalism of the last decades, which is directly connected to the sensation of watching. Breaking news implies the use of violence. The contents and visual character of TV news are related to violence, sometimes attempting to overscore the images circulating on the internet, where you can place much more shocking images than on television. So, how to work with this is still an open question for me. What I am particularly interested in is the phenomena about the “after” images: What kind of memories we have, after we saw something and how it influences us. So that is more interesting for me to work with than to analyse violent visual content, even if it contains important information. Nowadays, people share a lot of images of the corpses of Russian soldiers, whereas in Russia, people do not really see the disasters of this war so much. That’s why most of the Russian population supports this invasion. In their media space it is covered completely different. Nonetheless, the violent images create negative emotions and hatred. People also use these images to show their anger, creating a toxic situation in the media space.
ALW
This is a very important issue that you raised: How images of violence create realities, particularly in a time that we often term “post truth”. While we have propaganda, we certainly also have the will for neutral journalism, but both channels create individual realities for the respective viewership. Images of violence are a strong weapon to convince people of something. You have been stating that you support a more distanced and a less affective representation of violence, but I wonder what do you think about the idea of creating empathy through images? This kind of didactic idea that images create an emotion that leads to action. Are you sceptical of this strategy?
MR
I think this issue has two sides. Images of violence are showing a certain side of reality and they bring people who live in another reality – let's say in a peaceful context – closer to these events. This may be a way to provoke compassion. At the same time, however, conflicts and wars are often a long process, so that people usually get bored, even when there is such strong visual evidence. That creates a repetition and very quickly a loss of compassion. Strong images are an emotional force, but you cannot use the same force for a long time.
Mykola Ridnyi, Blind Spot, installation views, Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv, 2021
ALW
You have developed a very interesting theory throughout your works, relating the act of looking at images of violence, to the science of vision. Can you elaborate how you first came to this idea?
MR
The first work I developed in this context was “Blind Spot” in 2014, just after Russia annexed Crimea, provoking a war in the east of the country in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. There was a lot of information in the media related to some tragic events, for instance, that a village was destroyed with artillery. One media source argued it was Russian separatist forces who destroyed the village, while Russian sources argued the Ukrainians were guilty. While now, during the Russian invasion in 2022, we understand after this long and ongoing conflict how each side operates, in 2014, many facts were still unclear due to propagandistic reasons and representations. Back then I noticed this feeling that I cannot really trust the information – whether it tells me the facts or fakes. It was not only my own reaction, but the reaction of the whole Ukrainian society. That’s how I came to this metaphor of ‘blindness’: while we live in a world with the best possible accessibility to information, the problem is that there may be too much information, manipulating our opinion. The blind spot is the field in our vision, which is between the left and the right eye, in which we are basically blind. But our brains construct the reality in this field, relying on our visual and social experience – just how we react to the visual information in the media, in which we construct the missing pieces into a whole image.
ALW
It's an interesting analogy to the blending of facts and fiction, histories, and stories, that your films often contain, especially those addressing narratives of war and violence. The work “Grey Horses”, for example, embeds a historical narrative in a fictional setting. Is it the idea of constructing a missing truth, that drives you to create such narratives?
MR
It's a big question: what is truth? The film “Grey Horses” is based on the story of my great grandfather, who was a leader of an anarchist squad during the Civil War in Ukraine, from 1917 to 1923. There were few facts known about him – the only thing we knew, was that he was an anarchist, all the rest was unclear. He was arrested in 1923 by the Soviet Bolshevik authorities, and his court case documents are still stored in the State Archives. Getting access to these documents provided us a lot of information about his life. But can we be sure that that information is true? It was recorded under certain circumstances, probably under the presence of police, including a handwritten evidence report by a policeman. That was one moment I was keeping in mind while creating the film. Another one was related to the reflection of historical figures presented in films, in which the figure of the hero is often idealized. I saw a danger to create a heroic image of my great grandfather and tried to avoid this through different themes within the film.
Mykola Ridnyi, Grey Horses, film still, 2016
ALW
Were you fascinated with that part of your family’s history?
MR
Yes, but as I said, the story was completely unknown. Because after Bolsheviks won in the Civil War, all other groups of the leftist spectre were abandoned in Soviet Union. The anarchists were one of them, and they were proclaimed as enemies. So, if you had an anarchist in your family, you would be in trouble. For that reason, generations were keeping this part of history as a secret.
ALW
In your work “Lost Baggage” you used a very different and spatial approach – an ensemble of 5 sculptures that you placed at the entrance of the Kaunas train station for the 12th Kaunas Biennial in 2019. People could look through a small whole in human sized ceramic pots and spot drawings hidden inside of them. For this installation, you have been intertwining two different narratives: the one relies on a legend, while the other relies on the collective memory of what has happened to the Jewish minority in the ghettos of Lithuania. Can you tell me how you encountered the stories?
MR
When I was invited to make this work for the biennale, I found the story of Esther Lurie – a woman who was making the drawings of everyday life of the ghetto. The story about her suggests that she was hiding her drawings and words in ceramic pots, to save them from the Nazis. But they have never been found – there is no evidence that it happened. Her story turned into a legend and after the war she produced a couple of replicas of the lost images. I learned about sculpture technologies while studying at the art academy, so I knew ceramics were fragile, but when you make them monumental, you get the feeling of something heavy, even emotionally heavy.
The peek holes in the pots, again, relate to vision, because people needed to come very close to them to see the reproductions of the hidden drawings. In the regions of the former Soviet Union the commemoration of the Holocaust still has many blind spots, often it was even rejected as a phenomenon as such. There was anti-Semitism in the Soviet political system, but also in the everyday life. After the collapse of the USSR societies the new national states faced the situation of competition of victimhood: who suffered more from totalitarian regimes – Lithuanians, Polish, Ukrainians? Sometimes making it impossible to speak about other nations’ victims and especially the Jewish. The peek holes in the pots suggest that taking a closer look helps uncovering these blind spots.
Mykola Ridnyi, Lost Baggage, installation views, Kaunas biennial, 2019
ALW
I've been, as you know, researching and contesting this idea that trauma belongs to the domain of the unrepresentable. How have you been handling the subject of trauma in your work and how do you feel about its definition as the unrepresentable?
MR
I like to remind myself and find parallels between my approach and the practice of the Polish avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński, who emerged in early Soviet Russia time after WW1. Although he was not Jewish himself, he witnessed terrible events during World War II, such as the deportation of Jewish people or their life in the ghetto. What he saw was so traumatic and shocking, it was impossible for him to talk about it or to documented directly. Instead, he was invested in the affects and ethics of the “after vision”. The “after image” addresses the questions: what do you see after you witnessed a traumatic event? What is left from that event after you close your eyes? His drawings and photographic collages, to me, are a perfect example of how to work with trauma and its aftereffects. In 1947 he wrote the great theoretical piece “Theory of Vision” which confronts popular distinction between realism and abstraction of the time. I believe I use a similar strategy, but a very different mediums and different context.
Mykola Ridnyi, Gradual Loss of Vision, drawing from the series, 2017
ALW
This is fascinating! Explaining his practice makes me understand your approach much better now. If we continue talking about works of yours that evolve around aspects of vision, there is also your series “Gradual Loss of Vision” which consists of drawings, notes and prints…
MR
By the way, this work was added to the collection of the Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, which raised from the “neo-plastic room” which was once co-founded by the artist Strzemiński. This work brings together aspects of vision and sensationalism in relation to images of war. At a certain point, I realized that the war in Ukraine is not touching Western people anymore, it bores them. From 2014 onwards it felt very different inside Ukraine. We kept on receiving news that soldiers had passed somewhere – people died every day, just not in big numbers. For the rest of the world, it was a frozen conflict. The news agencies immediately shifted focus to Syria, because it was much bloodier at the time. The series uses vision as a metaphor for this process – I made these blurry maps, so that the gradual loss of vision is literally what you see and how you see it as a viewer. Dark shapes suggest maps, showing distributed territories of the former Soviet area – mainly located around the Black Sea, not only in Ukraine, but also in Moldova and in Caucasus area. All these maps are out of focus, just like the media lost focus of the territories and constantly changing borders. As conflicts were reactivated in the beginning of the year, everyone started talking about the war in Ukraine. Also the neighbouring regions are alerted that they will become the next parallel conflict spots.
A friend of mine compared this work of mine to the invisibility of cancer. Everyone knows about cancer, everyone's afraid it, but we do not have one shared image reference in our head. However, there is also Susan Sontag’s argument that it is not a good idea to project human diseases as metaphors for social conflicts or political events.
ALW
The question of making visible has another aspect – one that Sontag also speaks about: The notion that visualising conflicts is necessary and that it is important to distribute the images to a wide viewership. Today you can visualise almost everything and proof things, even diseases such as cancer from inside human bodies. The question is: does it make the horrible things displayed less threatening and harmful when they are visualised?
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| Mykola Ridnyi, Portrait © Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen |
I am agreeing that access to the information including visual information is important. We know the cases when it’s hidden for so called “security reasons”, but in fact it should be called “censorship”. The question is how much we became used to the images of disaster, calamity, and gore? When watching them became a habit or even addiction? It’s controversial because if we think about such images as of a tool of influence that means we react to its extreme limits. In other words: we should be aware that not only a murder of 100 or 1000 people is a tragedy but of 10 is a tragedy too and react accordingly.