Andriy Rachinskiy (b.1990) and Daniil Revkovskiy (b.1993) are a creative duo of Kharkiv. The artists are fusing different formats of artistic practices (installations, reenactment, video, archives), researching the contexts and landscapes of the industrial regions of Ukraine. Graduated from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, majoring in Graphic design. In 2010, they created the page called “Pamjat” (Memory) in Vkontakte. It was a social network to research the collective memory of the post-Soviet territory. This project was the starting point of their collaboration. Shortlisted for PinchukArtCentre Prize in 2018, 2020 and 2022, holders of the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2020 public choice award for the “Hooligans” project.
This exhibition is part of a larger project that tells the story of an engineer who tried to resist the “great terror” that began by order of the NKVD of the USSR No00447. Over a year and a half (August 1937 – November 1938), more than 700,000 people were sentenced to death, 140,000of which were in the Ukranian SSR. It is important to note that it is impossible to determine the exact statistics, which differ in different sources. Also, these data do not have information about repressionsin the territories of the TNR and Mongolian People’s Republic controlled by the USSR.
What is called the “Great Terror” or “Yezhovshchina”, or “Year 37” – affected all segments of the Ukrainian population from peasants, ethnic Poles, Germans, and other nationalities to virtually the entire leadership ofthe Ukrainian SSR and significant figures in the NKVD and the army. Metallurgy also did not stand aside: almost all directors of metallurgical plants were sentenced to death. Their families and entourage fellvictim to mass purges. Any malfunctions, failures of the Stakhanovist pace were considered sabotageand espionage.
This exhibition is a story about an engineer from Krivorozhstal, who is hiding from reprisals with his family under the building of the plant. The engineeris “hunted” by the search groups of police and the NKVD. The exposition presents his plans of intervention, which he creates for the newspaper “Izvestia”. During the interventions, he depicts caricatured portraits of enemies of the people (to which he is also referred) on the walls of the facades of industrial buildings. These actions takeon the features of temporary protest artistic practice.
Curator: Ksenia Malykh.
The work is a Museum of Human Civilisation which is established in the future after humans go extinct. The Museum is dedicated to the future archaeology of a tailings dam in Kryvy Rih. A tailings dam is a system of special facilities for storing radioactive, toxic and other non-recyclable waste from mineral processing. The work touches upon the issue of man’s responsibility for natural resources and chimeric forms that the imprint of human activity on Earth may acquire.
This section of the Museum of Human Civilization adds an important element in the search for causes of the existence and extinction of human civilization. It is assumed that Humans extracted minerals and metals from the earth, and after a process of enrichment, dumped untreated and uncovered waste onto the soil. In doing so, human civilization permanently changed the landscape of the world. This was presumably a reason for their demise.
Curator: Björn Geldhof
On July 2, 1996 in Kamenskoe (until 2016 – Dneprodzerzhinsk) the biggest catastrophe in the history of electric transport in Ukraine took place. Around 6 p.m. the tram KTM-5 (the inventory number 1044), followed the route number 2A along Chapaeva Street (from 2016 – Getman Doroshenko) down towards Anoshkina Avenue. There were more than 150 people in the tram.
On a steep and very long descent, the tram braking system failed. Valentina, the driver, warned passengers about bad brakes before descending. The tram rapidly gained speed, the driver lost consciousness, the controls were taken over by the mechanic, but he was not able to prevent the catastrophe. After two kilometers into descent, the tram at a speed of more than 75 km/h came off the rails and crashed into a concrete barrier. As a result of the disaster, 34 people were killed. More than 100 people received injuries of various severity. The driver remained disabled and received a suspended sentence. After the tragedy, she returned to the suburbs of Vinnytsa.
Today, many trams in Ukraine are in a poor condition, as well as tram tracks.
The project includes a video work with the events with the involvement of tram KTM.. in Ukraine with tedto the tragedy in Kamenskoe, a video from two tram depots in Mariupol, a video interview of a witness of events in Kamenskoe and video-search of Valentina in Vinnytsa region. The second part of the project is a performative recreation of Valentine’s life before the tragedy.
Recreating the tragic episode from the life of the driver and examining the typology of tram transport in the eastern region, we left open the issue of responsibility and awareness of the guilt for the collectiv ce.
In this work we explore the cruelest manifestations of sociocultural processes in the recent history of Ukraine. We speak about the gangs of so-called “runners” and unprecedentedly bloody street wars involving teenagers that took place in Kryvyi Rih in 1980s–1990s. Using the technique of fake historical reconstruction, we transfer the events and their characters to Zaporizhzhia. In the first part of the total installation, we reproduce the headquarters of one of the gangs, filling it with iconic objects and trophies taken from their opponents in confrontations. The second part reproduces an equally heroic parallel reality: it presents a police information board dedicated to the investigation into the underage criminals.
According to official data, more than 900 soldiers of ATO / JFO participants committed suicide in Ukraine. From 2014 to 2019, more than 500 thousand people took part in the hostilities. Most of them have PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Many of them have mental disorders.
This phenomenon led us to an analogy with the episodes of the film “Apocalypse Today” by Francis Ford Coppola in which the special forces captain was sent to the jungle bordering Cambodia and Vietnam to find a crazy colonel who commands a detachment worshiping him. During the trip, many strange events take place with the captain, at the end of which he loses his sense of reality and ceases to understand what to do next.
The current military-political situation in Ukraine, the active militarization of Russia, does not provide guarantees for a peaceful future. We decided to present one of the worst scenarios. Drawing an analogy with the film, Daniil Revkovskiy enters the role of a demented colonel who crossed the frontier and created a children’s detachment of killers in the Kharkov region. Andriy Rachinskiy was ordered to liquidate Daniil Revkovskiy.
The present appearance of many cities in the Donbas is directly connected with the construction of plants. Severodonetsk is no exception. We found an archive of postwar photographs documenting of
the Severodonetsk chemical plant construction. The photographer shot objects at different stages of the
building. Many of these photographs capture builders and workers of the plant, who accidentally got into
the frame.
Most of the photographs of that era are either staged, made by pre-invited correspondents or pictures from family archives. None of these show the objective reality of that time. Before the arrival of the correspondent the workers were selected, prepared, dressed in beautiful clothes and suitable locations were found for filming. Family photos are often made on holidays, around city attractions or in natural surroundings. Unlike the staged photos, this archive is interesting because it depicts people in their natural working environment.
Today most of the plants are not operating at full capacity. Some of them are shut down completely,
others are being demolished, or have already been demolished. What took decades to build was destroyed in a short time. The liquidation of plantsresults in a bounty of different types of scrap metal.
Themain material of our project is rusty metal. The idea of our project is not so much to show factories and their scale, the cities that were built, or what could have been, but rather the people. They are the past, the present and the future. Silhouettes of people appear as sources of light.
Portfolio: Yana Kononova Her work is informed by her geographical experience, inspired by both romantic and naturalistic worldviews, between which there is a tension
Yana Kononova is an artist with an academic background in sociology (PhD). She was born on Island in the Caspian Sea (Azerbaijan). During the First Nagorno Karabakh War, her family emigrated to Ukraine. Yana graduated from the Photoschool of Viktor Marushchenko and then studied the photography course during the long-term programme from Image Threads Collective (USA).
