A SOUVENIR LANDSCAPE
2021
After my grandfather passed away I inherited a big box, full of filmstrips. There were a great number of carefully cut pictures arranged in special boxes, and a large archive which had its own logic, unrecognizable to anyone else. I knew that he took photos, but I had never seen the images. They turned out to be truly close to me — desert landscapes, bewildered small people. Grandpa had tried to seize and preserve what was around him, to capture the real. His photographs show the endless routine that he observed in the world during his travels as chief mechanic aboard a ship. The images capture his desire to dissolve into the environment, transferring the story onto film. I don’t know if they were a means for him to permeate the memories of his whole life, or just a way to feel the keys to it in his pocket. But the filmstrips have become the space for a possible encounter with an era in which things, people, and conditions are distantly described and flicker, reminding us about themselves.
solo exhibition which includes paintings, found objects, poem, archive notes The Naked Room Gallery, Kyiv, Ukraine
curated by Lizaveta German and Maria Lanko
photo by Yevgen Nikiforov