Imagine waking up in the morning and feeling that your memory is somehow wrong. “The streets have been renamed, the branches of the trees are no longer in the right place, the monuments have new faces, and you may have a new face too.” But you don’t understand the whole thing because your memory has been reprogrammed. A terrifying idea? The old man talks very calmly about this, his feeling in the film “There are no Monuments to Monuments” by the Ukrainian artist Dana Kavelina, who deals with the themes of monuments and memory in a witty and complex way.
A woman who, like the man, appears like a random passer-by, says that memory is a disease. Another woman shows pity for the monuments. Because there are no monuments erected for other monuments, it is easier to forget than people.
Dana Kavelinas can also be seen on youtube film to be found in the Haus der Kunst. As one of a total of 19 videos and cinematic works by 17 Ukrainian artists and a group of artists who were there under the title “A letter from the frontSome of these artists “are currently trapped in the besieged cities or have fled to the border areas or to neighboring countries,” it is learned.
The film program, which was put together in a very short time, was produced by the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rivoli, with which Haus der Kunst works. It stands for a joint attempt to support Ukrainian artists in this way. They themselves say their films testify “to the work we did to prevent the conflict”. But you could also see it as a “premonition of an obvious and inevitable catastrophe”.
industrial hells and public places
In any case, “There are no Monuments to Monuments” constantly talks about catastrophes. And with the rest of the works that have been created in the last 15 years and are shown in the museum in a loop one after the other, a sense of uneasiness can be felt almost everywhere. “It’s a bloody hell!” says a man in “Labor Safety in the Region of Dnipropetrovsk” by Daniil Revkovsky and Andriy Rachinsky. What is meant is one of many “industrial hells” in the Ukrainian region of Dnipropetrovsk. That means industrial sites where people and the environment are not really considered. The film material is found, mostly cell phone recordings, they come from the workers itself. And when you see black smoke and fire in it, you immediately think of the war.
“Flag is burning” is the succinct name of a short video by Yaroslav Futymsky from 2019.
(Photo: Yaroslav Futymsky)
In “Regular Places” by Mykola Ridny we see public squares and streets in Kharkiv. Everything is actually very calm. But the images are overlaid with audio clips from online videos documenting protests or street fights. “Glory to Ukraine!” someone shouts, another “Motherfucker!”, and at one point gunshots are heard. Today, much of Ukraine’s second largest city lies in ruins. The three films by AntiGonna, which stand in the tradition of the “Cinema of Transgression”, are quite drastic. In one of them you see her sitting naked on a pile of bones. Yaroslav Futymsky appears in his short films “Flag is burning” and “Second attempt” with a white flag in his hand. In the first film, a young woman lights the flag. In the second, he stretches her like a net on the beach, where she is difficult to make out against the gray clouds. Symbols for the futile hope for peace?
In “As Far As Possible”, Nikolay Karabinovych deals with the Jewish and Greek history of Ukraine and with his own family history, with a reference to the Second World War. This is also the case with Yuri Leiderman, who in “Birmingham Ornament” had his father tell about his own World War experiences. The occupiers at the time were the Nazis, who, as we learn in a fictitious, parallel thread from two Moscow “television announcers”, were the first to switch from “geopolitics” to “geopoetics”, in order to separate ethnic groups , races, nations into “non-existent objects”. First in language, then in reality. The Russian leadership has also been rewriting reality and memory according to its own ideas for years. With similarly brutal consequences.
A letter from the front, until April 5th, Haus der Kunst, Prinzregentenstraße 1, hausderkunst.de