In a room inside a Liverpool gallery, Saskia Pay, a younger British actor wearing studiedly extraordinary denims and high, is sitting on a chair in entrance of a digicam. The man with the digicam, Ukrainian artist Andrii Dostliev, briefs a trio of different ladies, all of them refugees from Ukraine, on the kind of picture he’s making an attempt to create. He signifies the props they’ll use – a foil blanket, an arm sling, a unclean teddy bear, some make-up. The ladies nod. They don’t want a lot in the way in which of rationalization. Everybody is aware of this type of image.
Unhesitatingly they transfer in, wrapping the foil blanket round Pay’s shoulders. “It might be extra pure if she had marks on her face,” certainly one of them factors out, and one other will get to work with the make-up. Subsequent, hair. One of many ladies says that when she was residing underneath occupation – within the city of Makariv, west of Kyiv, close to Bucha, which fell underneath Russian management initially of the full-scale invasion – she simply pulled hers right into a ponytail and it went unwashed for days on finish. One other observes that it will be higher if the mannequin had some blood on her face. They offer her the teddy bear to clutch to her physique; they offer her the arm sling.
This scene is being created for the Ukrainian pavilion on the 2024 Venice Biennale, a very powerful worldwide clan-gathering of the worldwide artwork world, and one which all the time shines a lightweight on the geopolitical temper of the second. For the earlier version, which opened in April 2022 laborious on the heels of the Russian full-scale invasion, Ukrainian artist Pavlo Makov someway, miraculously, managed to flee bombarded Kharkiv to have the ability to present his work on the occasion. This yr, although, would be the first time the Ukrainian pavilion will current artwork made within the thick of invasion – artwork that reveals one thing of what it’s prefer to have lived for 2 years underneath the shadow of aggression and violence.
The title of Ukraine’s exhibition is Web Making – a reference to the communal volunteer exercise of knotting collectively camouflage nets for the battle effort. (I’ve seen folks patiently at work doing this within the central library in Lviv, in western Ukraine.) Nevertheless it additionally alludes to the act of constructing connections, reaching past artists’ personal voices into communities, maybe even holding one thing collectively that’s fragile and desires protected containment.
The pavilion will present an intimate, transferring hour-long movie lower collectively by Andrii Rachynskyi and Daniil Revkovskyi from footage posted by residents to YouTube, inserting the viewer proper contained in the civilian expertise of invasion. One other work, which Katya Buchatska has made with neurodiverse artists, considers what occurs when language itself is violently ruptured throughout a battle. The overarching thought of the pavilion, says co-curator Max Gorbatskyi, was that every work ought to “contain folks as collaborators, or discuss some real-life experiences”, venturing past an artist’s singular imaginative and prescient. “We don’t wish to discuss solely in regards to the battle, solely about how we’re struggling in the midst of a disaster. We wish to present how individuals are residing their lives, each inside and outdoors Ukraine, in the course of the battle,” provides co-curator Viktoria Bavykina.
The main focus of Dostliev’s work, which he has conceived together with his longtime collaborator Lia Dostlieva, is on the refugee expertise, and the stereotypes that collect round Ukrainians within the western European press. As quickly as they arrive within the gallery within the morning, the three Ukrainian refugees inform Dostliev about their lives because the invasion compelled them to flee their nation. Daryna Ushkanovs, Maryna Bileka and Tetiana Shestak every have very totally different experiences. Bileka is a tattoo artist, she says, and has slipped fairly simply into freelancing. Ushkanovs, who has a younger youngster, got here to Liverpool to hitch her Lithuanian husband’s household, so she has a ready-made community within the metropolis. Shestak, whose daughter has simply began faculty, lives on the outskirts of Liverpool, in Prescot. It’s laborious to search out part-time work there; equally, it’s a protracted bus trip into town centre, making it laborious to suit shifts spherical the college day. She feels remoted. “I’ve some melancholy; we don’t have many Ukrainian folks in Prescot,” she says. “For these two years I’ve felt some degradation.”
Dostliev and Dostlieva’s work isn’t solely being made in Liverpool; they’re additionally asking actors from numerous elements of central and western Europe to re-enact cliched photographs for a set of video portraits – all of them, crucially, with Ukrainian refugees directing and guiding the actors.
The duo, who’ve a background in anthropology, have been researching stereotypes, and concepts round what makes a refugee “acceptable” in a number nation. Dostliev talks about how some refugees have been seen as “too rich”, as if their possession of automobiles and good garments would defend them from bombs; about how Ukrainian ethnic minorities such because the Roma have obtained very totally different therapy from their fellow residents. “The concept of refugees directing the shoots was a method of giving them company,” says Dostliev. “They’ve all confronted stereotypes. By doing this, they now get a symbolic second of energy over a German or Polish or British actor.”
Dostliev explains to the Ukrainian ladies that as we speak’s state of affairs, with the Liverpool-based actor Pay, is in regards to the picture of the lone feminine sufferer of battle: the girl photographed outdoors her bombed residence, within the shock of loss. Tons of of such photographs have circulated; Gorbatski mentions one particularly that turned totemic within the first months of the full-scale invasion, exhibiting nursery instructor Olena Kurilo’s bloodied and bandaged face after her house close to Kharkiv was hit. Dostliev describes the form of image: “A girl in dire want who has simply escaped. Somebody who has no company, no voice, who simply sits there staring on the floor and looking out very traumatised.” It isn’t that the photographs are unsuitable or inaccurate or deceptive – fairly, that they’re incomplete, he argues. “Persons are lowered to their struggling.”
After they’ve completed making ready Pay for her shoot, the Ukrainian ladies stand again, happy with their work. Dostliev then begins filming Pay, who holds nonetheless, solely her expression shifting and altering as she begins to behave the half she has been given. At one level Shestak suggests Pay transfer her eyes round – folks in shock are distracted, can’t focus, she says. One thing unusual occurs within the room: though Pay’s job is to embody a stereotypical picture, she begins to inhabit her function with a real energy. The chitchat stops and for some moments, everybody falls silent.
After about 5 minutes, Dostliev breaks the temper: “Do you wish to take just a few moments earlier than the following go?” he asks gently. “That was intense,” murmurs Gorbatskyi. Later, Ushkanovs says that it had awoken troublesome recollections. “Within the second, I believed she was an actual sufferer,” she says. “I believed it was 5 minutes after an explosion.” She is recalling February 2022, when “there have been Russian tanks on our avenue”; when a rocket hit a constructing 300 metres from her residence. The road between a sure irony, and the suspension of disbelief, seems to be extraordinarily positive.
After just a few takes, everybody discusses what has simply occurred. Joel, the Guardian’s photographer, is thinking about all this: the portrait shot as we speak is in any case a critique of reports photographers’ portrayal of the battle. “The work is about folks coming and going through cliches that exist of their societies,” says Dostliev. He talks of the significance of “listening to Ukrainian voices, giving a voice to folks – not simply portraying them as suits another person’s agenda. There’s so typically some ‘extra certified’ particular person from the west talking for them.”
Pay talks about how she embodied the function. “I attempted to think about the way in which folks had been me – there have to be a component of individuals being stared at like animals in a zoo. It’s simple to overlook individuals are human.”
Bileka says: “We see the identical face all over the place within the information when any home is destroyed in Kharkiv or Kyiv.” Joel asks what’s lacking from footage. “The issue is that if individuals are not ‘struggling sufficient’, they aren’t attention-grabbing sufficient for footage,” says Dostliev. The seek for probably the most resonantly surprising picture of despair, he says, “will get a bit disturbing sooner or later”.
Joel asks the Ukrainian ladies in the event that they suppose the picture of the “struggling girl” is a cliche. Ushkanovs replies elliptically: “My GP in Liverpool requested me if the battle remains to be happening.” Shestak says that folks have began asking her whether or not she’s going again but. The implication is that photographs are necessary: they must play their half to maintain the battle in folks’s minds in western Europe. There are not any simple solutions on this dilemma of illustration as Russia’s invasion continues, as an emboldened Putin settles in for a brand new time period in energy, as Ukraine continues to withstand its aggressive neighbour and as one other battle rages on mercilessly in Gaza. Solely take heed to the voices, urge Dostliev and Dostlieva. See past the stereotype. Strive to hook up with one other human in her irreducible complexity.
