Feature

“We f**ked up.” Six Ukrainian parafictions in art worth knowing about

4 march, 2024

Yuliia Manukian

Parafiction, a genre on the verge of fact and confabulation, is gaining momentum in contemporary Ukrainian art. Is post-truth the reason for that?

Parafictions, or counterfactual artistic practices (those offering alternative historic scenarios), delve into the ambiguous connection between the documental and the fictional, intentionally erasing the borders between the two and involving data interpretation, inauthentic narration, historical revisionism and speculations on the future.

According to Nele Wynants, the author of When fact is fiction. Documentary art in the post-truth era, reinterpretation of oral and archived sources often pursues a critical objective — to tear down canonic history, reflect on the contemporaneity or toy with utopias. It is the mystification techniques that teach us a more skeptical perception and consumption of information.

But one should not confuse fiction and illusion. Quoting Oleksandr Sushynskyi, founder of the Laboratory of Aesthetic Research, illusion is the first step towards conspiracy theories offering simple answers to the challenges of the complicated inconstant space of information flows. Parafiction, on the contrary, is an antidote to belief in conspiracy theories.

This text covers six Ukrainian art projects dealing with mystification by critically reflecting on our reality and sometimes forecasting it. There is a good reason why the article’s title features the expressive phrase “WE FUCKED UP” written out on the end walls of old prefabricated buildings — a part of the Soot project by Daniil Revkovskiy and Andrii Rachinskyi. This is a kind of recognition of critical thinking’s defeat with regard to reality, which itself is nothing else but the outcome of utopic plans and visions of all times. Still, the bloody price paid for their realization (through wars and social disruptions) turned them into fiction.

That’s what the first project from the list is about — how utopia becomes dystopia.

Daniil Revkovskiy and Andrii Rachinskyi, Soot, 2018. Photo: prostory.net.ua

Darkness as a dystopic scenario

Virtually in all of their works, Daniil Revkovskiy and Andrii Rachinskyi focus on social entropy spanning from the downfall of the Soviet empire to the potential future of new independent territories after its collapse. Their method includes archiving the non-existent but realistic — as their visionary (re)constructions are generated by real catastrophes.

So is the case with the reconstruction of the criminal case Darkness, with its events unfolding in 2023 (II Biennale of Young Art “Looks like I’m entering our garden,” Kharkiv, 2019).

This is the story about a “colonel” suffering from PTSD (portrayed by Revkovskiy) whose mind is damaged by the war in the manner of how Colonel Kurtz was in Apocalypse Now. Returning home, he gets together a brigade of children from Kharkiv and nearby villages, children left behind and despaired, willing to die for the idea which he actually personifies — as God and executioner who will teach them to love death (a reference to Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Golding’s Lord of the Flies). Like Kurtz said: “I’ve seen horrors…you must make a friend of horror, otherwise it will be your enemy…”

Daniil Revkovskiy and Andrii Rachinskyi, fragments of the project Darkness, 2019. Photo courtesy of Borys Filonenko.

Andrii Rachinskyi and Daniil Revkovskiy, fragments of the project Darkness, 2019. Photo courtesy of Borys Filonenko.

Particulars of the “case,” which include brutal pictures of a staged massacre (imitated photo registration of real murders), notes, weapons, and other documented evidence of insanity, were placed in the colonel’s “office” in a kindergarten basement (basement of YermilovCentre as a hint of a tabooed topic which has no place in the “white cube”).

Scythian Gold as a vulgarity test

Scythian Gold is one of the projects that Stas Voliazlovskyi did not have the chance to realize; a reaction to the scandal surrounding the heirloom stuck in the Netherlands due to the occupation of Crimea in 2014 (the artifacts from four Crimean museums were returned to Ukraine in November 2023).

The exposition features cheap bijouterie and haberdashery tinsels blown over with golden acryl: “fake bride-groom necklaces…signet rings leaving black marks on the fingers. Cheap dandy luxury.” Those are complemented by caption plates with typical museum commentaries written by an employee of the history department of Kherson Local History Museum.

Fragment of the project Scythian Gold, 2020. Photo courtesy of Kherson Museum of Contemporary Art.

Voliazlovskyi’s idea trolls the habit of “our elite” to wear trinkets found within grave mounds, through “black archeology” and in private collections of Ukrainian oligarchs which illegally “roam” the museums, swarming with fakes peddled to the newly-minted “collectors.”

Fragment of the project Scythian Gold, 2020. Photo provided by Kherson Museum of Contemporary Art.

The concept could have been realized in 2017 when Oleksandr Sushynskyi was ready to falsify, as part of the Fakelogy project, the exhibition Scythian Gold at a local history museum. He planned to invite distinguished guests from the city and the (fake) Netherlands consul, thus provoking not a local but at least a nationwide scandal. But that was not to be.

On the artist’s birthday, on October 14, 2020, the Kherson Museum of Contemporary Art inaugurated the namesake exhibition — homage to the project. Panels upholstered with vintage plush displaying “gold” serves as a background for the chief “artifact” — a grotesque imitation of the Tsar’s burial mound. A skeleton drawn by Oleksandr Zhukovskyi on black satin is surrounded by everything that was dear to him in life, including the “golden loaf” (a gift found at the residency of the Ukrainian ex-president Viktor Yanukovych after he left the country in 2014 — ed.)

Story of a loss that never happened (but not for sure)

The exhibition titled Closed Futures: The Lost History of the Dnipropetrovsk Museum of Modern Art (Known Cages team led by Clemens Poole) in the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture, as part of the VII Construction Festival (Dnipro, 2021) made me feel admiration and shame at the same time.

It is a reconstruction of the unknown history of the museum, which opened in 1974, through the efforts of the art critic Kateryna Bilonozhko. For two years, it was a space bringing together non-conformist artists from Dnipropetrovsk and other cities until destroyed by Soviet censorship, and its history has been almost completely lost.

Items on display at the exhibition Closed Future: The Lost History of the Dnipropetrovsk Museum of Modern Art, VII Festival in Dnipro, 2021. Photo courtesy of the author.

The exhibits included fragments of the collection, from the Soviet radio receiver ironically named “brekhunets” (“liar” in Ukrainian — ed.) to the real artworks of the time, as well as the archival records and video interviews. Everything looked so convincing that the visitors and I were embarrassed: how such an impressive underground phenomenon could have been missed.

In fact, this falsified story, as envisioned by Clemens Poole, clarifies the potential of a real art community in retrospect and its impact on the current state and future development of the city’s creative environment: “No future is ever really closed.”

This is the best interpretation of the illusiveness of any “reliable source,” construction of a myth at the “academic” level, where “I believe because this is absurd” ceases to be a cliché and becomes the only reliable peg in the multiplicity of “truths.” It has seriously shaken my faith in archives but strengthened it as to the effects of strong artistic expression, so I am glad to be a victim of this “experiment.”

“Hollywood – Troeshchyna” as a simulacrum of “successful success”

Mykhailo Alekseienko, the curator of “Kvartyra 14” gallery, gained Grand Prix of the MUHI-2017 competition for the “Hollywood – Troeshchyna” project as a talented artistic statement of “the excessive influence of social media on the life of a person today.”

Mykhailo Alekseienko, Slideshow, Hollywood – Troeshchyna, 2017. Source: Mykhailo Alekseienko channel.

At first, it was a fun adventure: staying in Troeshchyna, Mykhailo convinced the community that he was going to Hollywood to make a series of storyboards for a new project. Mykhailo Alekseienko had actually received such an order, but his current tourist visa did not allow the work-related trip, and the artist decided to fulfill the order at home. However, he did not disclose this. Instead, Mykhailo locked himself up in “Kvartyra 14” and started posting photos from Los Angeles on Facebook, relying on Google Maps and even taking into account the time zone differences. When friends started asking Mykhailo to bring gifts, he went to Troeshchyna market to buy them. Having “returned,” Mykhailo Alekseienko organized a big party where none of the guests expressed doubts about his stay in LA, even though he was never seen in the photos posted on social media.

Then the artist showed the video “taken” there, indicating in the credits everyone who followed his posts, commented, and liked. It was the beginning of confession to the mystification and, at the same time, to self-hypnosis — Mykhailo felt that he was really sending greetings from Hollywood. He experienced all the associated emotions, i.e., searching for his passport, excitement from the journey, longing for home, and joy of returning, because “high-rise urban paradise” turned out to be more familiar than the flat spaces of Hollywood.

Hearing the lost voices (on behalf of alter ego)

Room of Lelia Yefremova installation by Dana Kavelina (Melitopol — Kyiv) is an example of the creation of an alter ego as the strategy for criticizing the censorship or a way to tell the “uncomfortable” story that might provoke the moralistic outrage or accusations of deviance.

Dana Kavelina, Room of Lelia Yefremova, 2021. Source: Secondary Archive.

The artist reconstructed the room of Lelia Yefremova, a non-existent person who committed suicide. Photographs of the funeral and wake were added to the photos of her everyday life, the poor quality of which created the impression of a documentary.

The author consistently works with the topic of collective trauma and memory, as well as violence, using the evidence given by women and data from their research to feminize history through the female lens.

Dana Kavelina, Room of Lelia Yefremova, an installation fragment, 2021. Source: Secondary Archive.

This method is implemented in the project through the reference to the author’s personal 7-year struggle with clinical depression, which onset at the beginning of the war in Ukraine in 2014. Depression for the artist is also a war, a story that usually ends badly. She interprets it as a protest against participation in political processes, processes of exploitation, political violence, and alienation: “Depression is the only adequate strategy in the situation where we cannot influence the real political processes, when we are deprived of the right to vote.”

It was the trigger for the creation of the project about Lelia, whose protest ended with the radical deletion of herself from the circle of numerous failures.

Modest charm of the Austro-Greek style

One day, returning from the capital, Taras Polataiko, the artist from Chernivtsi, saw a new gilded plaque on the façade of the railway station, which said that it had been built in 1906 “in the Austro-Greek style.” A term invented by the city administrators freely interpreting “the Austro-Hungarian period.”

Photo taken from the author’s Facebook page.

It really struck his imagination, so he began a long-term study of this non-existent style as a manifestation of profanation, kitsch, and overall bad taste in the Chernivtsi architecture. Taras Polataiko collected the relevant “samples” for the exhibition of “the most outstanding artworks” and asked others to share such samples.

Taras Polataiko, samples of the Austro-Greek style in Chernivtsi. Photos collected by the author. Source: Suspilne Chernivtsi.

The artist went further and created an unofficial department to protect historical heritage and tourism development, explaining the need for such a department by inaction of the official agencies. Moreover, the artist believes that thanks to those agencies, the Austro-Greek style is becoming increasingly influential. Fans of the newly coined style sent photos of “the Austro-Greek monumentalism” spotted in Ivano-Frankivsk and even Romania.

At the same time, Taras Polataiko seemingly denied “the cultural mystification” because the authorities legitimized the style with a plaque, and the expert community “swallowed” it. However, after “promotion” on social media, the plaque disappeared. But it was too late — the artist did not let the “phenomenon” fade into obscurity; it went beyond the aesthetic domain into the ethical and political space.

Taras Polataiko, The Austro-Greek parade on the 150th anniversary of the Chernivtsi railway, collage. Photo taken from the author’s Facebook page.

Next, Taras Polataiko was going to announce the start of the Austro-Greek Games, appealing to the International Olympic Committee to recognize Austro-Greek wrestling as an official sport. Ivo Bobul was invited to write the anthem (however, the artist did not say whether the invitation was accepted). For the heraldry, the Bukovinian bull or the owl in the form of a lion, the dominant element in the modern architecture of Bukovyna, was offered.

The artist believes that style is exemplified by the “Sorbonne” restaurant, built by a city council member in the UNESCO protected area without permission, and “Grand Aristocrat” restaurant (in Dubivtsi village), famous for the wedding celebration where 70 Bukovinians got poisoned.

Aristocrat restaurant in the Dubivtsi village, Chernivtsi region. Photo taken from the author’s Facebook page.

The genealogy of this style as a whole, including educational events and discussions, could be traced on Facebook page of the artist. The war put “the cultural mystification” on hold.

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