ARTHUR BONDAR & OKSANA YUSHKO
Encouraging ability to see things from multiple perspectives, the project metaphorically indicates a step that is too ambitious or overreaching in a time of war. The project calls to actions to start a journey of a thousand miles beginning with a single step, bringing attention to the important issues, raises questions about current political and ecological thinking.
Building bridges we unveil and visualize the hidden connections, bringing to the light need of support, span and foundation.
"The Bridge"
Borders divide people from reality and each other, multiplying people’s fears and uncertainties. A glass, a protective screen between two realities prevents interaction and makes impossible to listen to each other.
‘Mind the gap’ became an essential warning. Bridging this gap the artists reveal connections which exist between separated things, reflecting on existing relationships, real or fake interactions, ‘making kin in a world that rips us apart from each other’.
"Cover"
“Stupefied by prayers, sermons, exhortations, by processions, pictures, and newspapers, the cannon's flash, hundreds of thousands of men, uniformly dresses, carrying divers deadly weapons, leaving their parents, wives, children, with hearts of agony, but with artificial sprightliness, go where they, risking their own lives, will commit the most dreadful act of killing men whom they do not know and who have done them no harm.”
Leo Tolstoy / "Bethink yourselves!"
The Advocate of Peace Journal, September 1904, Vol. 66, pp. 164-176
Today, many Russian cultural figures, be they writers or artists, are faced with the question of how to talk about war when even the word "war" has become taboo? Can an artist even talk about it as long as war continues and people die? Everyone answers these questions in his own way. And at this time, in the light of the flaring war, we have to hide cultural treasures in the darkness of underground shelters, waiting for the time when we can speak of peace again.
"The Carpet"
Where is your carpet, there is your home says a nomadic proverb, transforming unknown territory into familiar landscape, stitching the broken memories, repairing the holes.
The artist builds a ‘temporary shelter’ for those who are in need, hospitably inviting a viewer to look through a visual diary of the last year or an artist’s kitchen. This backdoor also brings the audience to the unknown stitch studies of the times, when pseudo national art and culture was absolutely empty of any content. The backside of the found herbarium in an abandoned school reveals much more about the past than such artificially maid history. The thread draws the stories associated with specific places, people and time. The embroidery, the enigmatic stitches transform into wire figures and a suprematist grammar, forming a new vocabulary and presenting multidimensional narratives.
"The Victory Column"
The Column of Victory made from old parquet brings to the light the human tragedy of war. The use of old wood refers to the price of any victory which human pay in times of crises.
"The Bird’s Nest"
The current ecological crises and a number of environmental problems have roots in relationships between human and nature, and in the ways how we, humans, as a species, regard the natural world.
Learning from nature we construct our reality often brutally violating it. A famous proclamation from the 1930 by Ivan Michurin ‘we cannot wait for kindnesses from nature; our task is to wrest them from her,’ strongly influenced this view. An empty bird’s nest, artificial vessels point attention to such brutal engineering projects and attitude.The found objects becomes a form of a cognitive play that stimulates the human mind and invite to find a personal associations.
Interrelationships between different actors, cross-pollination of ideas and thoughts, collaboration across different boundaries and limitations are the topics of our research.
The project outlines the bridges between war and peace then and now, bringing to the light need of support and care, standing with love and humanity.
