Videoinstallation "Buttons" is composed out of three elements: a video piece - the nearly static Edie Sedgwick's "Screen Test" by Andy Warhol, an audio - Winston Churchill's speech to the House of Commons from 4 June 1940 known as "We shall fight on the beaches" and an object - two buttons glued to the screen covering Edie's eyes. "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!", speaks out Churchill to his compatriots, while a nice-looking blond girl stares at the spectator with her hypnotic button-eyes.
- 2010—2013
- The End: TV-screen blacks out and is gradually filled up with cast list and other credits while the final song starts playing... In his short video "Untitled" Andriy Stegura exploits the standard method of movie culture - to "finish" the spectator after the film drama with cold technical information and emotional music theme. In the artist's video the final credits have no movie to refer to, yet it must have been about Ukraine if it ever existed (the folk song and the trident disguised as japanese character make a hint). The unmade movie (which can be read as the absence of cultural memory) results in corresponding consequences - unreadable text and a song styled as folk, yet performed with a over foreign accent. Ukrainian identity is revealed here as "alien" not only for export, where it is bound to the status of exotics, but first and foremost in the internal circulation leaving the trident and the pseudo-folk tune as the only posiible clues...
Oleksandr Solovyov's text on the project:
Temporal and unique visual marks explode from the surfaces. External restraints and internal images create a monopoly
of the enlarged foregrounds. Digital and gaming techniques mix with kitsch and irony, and memories and remembrances, to create a bespoke index of transcendence and information.
- 2008Marsel Onysko, Carpathian Album (together with Robert Saller)
Artists' text about the project:
Are you living somewhere you do not want to? Perhaps you should prepare for a good trip. Find your favorite armchair… electric fire… wrap yourself up in a flannel blanket… it's rainy outside… wild is the wind… last trams leaving to depot... You are closing your eyes or lingering on patterns of your old wallpaper and all of a sudden you hear sounds from your childhood: a seething waterfall… a deer carefully approaching a creek while under the quiet watch of a bear. The fragrances of herbs and spicy smells of mushrooms — everything is so real that you are already part of this picture. Then you sit down on the trolley of mountain narrow-gauge railway and meditate on the music appropriate for this scene. You thoughts are flowing… your mind is going through your entire record collection and when it couldn't find something just right, it produces a new one especially for this case.
Close your eyes and imagine this music. Then open them and look at the Carpathian Album.
