In a series titled ‘Faces of War’ (2022-23), you might expect to see the hardened stares of battle-ready soldiers in front of the camera, but here are the faces of everyday people. Citizens of different ages and walks of life. These are the witnesses, the displaced, the victims and the heroes during a time of invasion and war.
In photographing these subjects, Chekmenev has considered the formal aspects of traditional portraiture in photography or painting. Faces are carefully lit and emerge from the shadows of the dark or dimly lit spaces. The backgrounds reveal signs of the character of the environments that the people occupy: blacked-out doors and windows, sandbags and artificial lighting suggest places of safety and shelter. The subjects sit for their portraits with varying postures and gazes that convey strength and defiance but Chekmenev has also recorded moments of contemplation and reflection.
They clutch belongings: warm clothing, jars of preserves, a rifle, feed for a goat. Chekmenev understands the importance of these people’s stories and his opportunity to tell them. This is apparent in his earlier projects too: ‘Citizens of Kyiv’ (2022), is a chronicling of life in the capital city of Ukraine following the Russian invasion in 2022; ‘Deleted’ (2018-20), presents portraits of some of the 1000s of homeless inhabitants of the city of Kyiv, many of whom had lost everything since the start of the war in Eastern Ukraine and rely on the help of NGOs and charities; and ‘Odesa People’ (1999-2019), consists of black and white documentary photographs of people in the streets and other public places in post-Soviet Odessa, made over a 20 year period. These projects are not photojournalism.
They differ greatly from some of the ‘fly-in, fly-out’ pictures from Ukraine offered by the international media. Since the early 1990s, Chekmenev has been making personal work about the everyday, photographing from within Ukrainian communities with an acute understanding of the importance of recording the history of his country and its people.
Anton Shebetko (1990, Ukraine) uses extensive research to highlight the Queer history of Ukraine and its absence in this nation’s public memory. He works actively with members of the Ukrainian LGBTQ+ community that flourished within a conservative Ukrainian society. Through interviews and archival research, Shebetko strives to construct a public memory and raise awareness for the national Queer community.
In his series To Know Us Better, Shebetko portrays Queer Ukrainians who are living or temporarily staying in Europe. Their experience and hopes for a better future are documented in a series of portraits and heartfelt interviews. The series shows people who moved after Russia’s occupation of Crimea, the war in the East in 2014 and Russia’s full invasion in 2022. A part of the community has fled Ukraine to find refuge in neighbouring countries. Others have decided to stay or return to safe places within the country. These portraits and heartfelt interviews document their experiences and hopes for a better future.
Additionally, Shebetko created the publication A Very Brief and Subjective Queer History of Ukraine. This self-published book includes years of iconographic and written research. Interviews and essays from Shebetko’s archive are featured alongside others that were created specifically for this publication.
A central piece of his publication A Very Brief and Subjective Queer History of Ukraine is a timeline. It has been drawn that highlights key moments in the history of this community. Shebetko used Carlos A. Motta’s Brief History of Homosexual Repression in Ukraine (2014) as a reference in the construction of this timeline. This work was presented at the Future Generation Art Prize 2014 exhibition in Kyiv’s Pinchuk Art Centre. Shebetko attempts to complete Motta’s research by filling in the gaps and adding new dates. The timeline starts with the historical oppression and leads toward gained visibility over the past few years.
Side notes: A special episode of Foam’s podcast Foam Talks explores how communitarian archives are fostering a new understanding of queer life and culture in Eastern Europe. Besides Shebetko, the conversation welcomes Karol Radziszewski, Polish artist and co-founder of Queer Archives Institute for Central and Eastern Europe. The conversation is moderated by Jim van Geel, Coordinator Public Programme at Rijksakademie and Curator Public Programme Young Design at Design Museum.
Foam Editions offers a limited-edition print by Anton Shebetko. All proceeds of this sale will go to humanitarian funds in Ukraine. link
Artem Humilevskiy is a neophyte of photography. He started to photograph quite recently, in 2019, and the first attempts to master this medium were of a commercial nature. He got involved in photography as an art that fits into the system of contemporary art after a blitz study at MYPH photography school in Mykolaiv and meeting its leader and teacher Sergey Melnitchenko. Melnitchenko’s projects (‘Schwarzenegger – my idol’, ‘Young and free?’) were dealing, among other things, with the problem of corporeality. It was an irony of masculine athleticism in the first case and a special photo session of some sort of a men’s club in the natural environment in the latter. But in both cases, these were not the exercises in the search for body plasticity in the traditional nude photography genre.
In Humilevskiy’s first project after this school, The Giant, the question of the body also takes a prominent place. It is the core of the curatorial concept and text. In The Giant, too, it is not just a fixation on ordinary male nudity but an extreme body that fits into different types of spaces: closed and open, interior and landscape. The closeness of the first images in the project was due to the Covid restrictions. Disconnection, the collapse of established communication links, isolation and loneliness — all this became a motivating reason to pick up a camera and plunge into self-reflection in these forcibly abnormal and harsh conditions. As the regime loosened, the photographer’s lens naturally opened the spatial horizons of studying his non-trivial body. As a result, all this turned into a kind of adventure, a journey of the body; of the Great Body. The author was able to turn the mise-en-scène narrative into the mythological realm; into the story about the life of some fabled giants.
If you try to define the project’s genre, it will be difficult to do so because of its hybridity and blur. In essence, this is a self-portrait (mainly full or half-length portraits), but in an environment, including a landscape. The unique quality of the project is its everydayness. Due to this diffuseness, the study of the inner world acquires equal importance with the visual outline and construct of the outer world. The fusion, not the opposition, of these worlds, gives The Giant harmonious naturalness, integrity, and imaginative appeal.
In his interview with the Kyiv-based Bird in Flight media, Humilevskiy emphasised the key point: ‘In the photographs, I am always naked, because for me the body is always about sincerity and openness, and I want to be as honest as possible with the viewer.’ Attitudes towards the naked body, say, in ancient times (there is even such a concept among art historians – ‘heroic nudity of a mature man’), or in our era of total and flattering selfies, Instagram exhibitionism, unrestrained demonstration of fitness beauty, TV shows like ‘I’m ashamed of my body’, ‘Weighed and happy’, of course, are very different. Today it is difficult to surprise someone, to stun someone in this bodily flow. And our author is saved because he does not strive for this but tries, as follows from the quote above, to be sincere and honest. This somewhat ‘Rabelaisian’ approach gives rise to self-irony and a state of ‘unarmed nakedness’, as the German journalist Peter-Matthias Gaede aptly called it, which can attract the attention of the viewer and evoke their increased interest due to, rather paradoxically, its simplicity, unpretentiousness and organicity. At the same time, it does so without the help of accompanying bodily sexuality. In Humilevskiy’s project, it is absent; the question of the body is exhausted by the body as such. An experienced viewer is more likely to have connotations from the history of art, including the modern one, where the line of the hyperbolised body form is prominently revealed: the Flemish Rubens and Jordaens, the Colombian Botero, the British Lucien Freud, and the Ukrainian Lesya Khomenko, with her picturesque cycle ‘Giants’.
In Humilevsky’s Giant, the large form prevails. The figures seem to be sculptural, pointedly voluminous. Their relief is implanted, as it were, in the 2D picture, inside it. In the series, which includes more than a hundred subjects, different approaches to shooting on location are apparent. There are casual, even spontaneous ones and more structured, theatrically excessive ones. The colour scheme also differs: from a more restrained one, based on tighter colour combinations, to a brighter and more colourful one. In the project, despite the complete presence of a monohero, there is no monotony also because it unexpectedly combines comedy and sadness, naivety and seriousness, logical justification and absurdity.
Another distinctive feature of the project is its keenly felt involvement in the events in Ukraine; the spirit of the times is very insightfully conveyed. And it’s not even about direct patriotism, when, let’s say, the national flag colours are used in several photographs, but about the suspense, anxious anticipation, and foreboding that literally permeates the mood of the series. The fact that the author finished his project as soon as a full-scale invasion began is quite natural. The war has strongly influenced the further life of the project, inevitably changing and adding new intonations to its current perception.
Images – courtesy of the artist
The article has been written by Oleksandr Soloviov on the occasion of an online exhibition, ‘The Giant’ at BAROQUE Gallery, accessible from phones and tablets at the link
I love the expressions in these portraits. The slightly cheeky, innocent girl with pleading eyes. The doleful enigmatic expression of the teenager, possibly sulky, possibly scared. Then the defiant, challenging young woman. The following images in the series hint at context; the collections of Spice Girls and Harry Potter memorabilia could belong to any millennial young woman in the West.
The young woman wears a shirt emblazoned with the words ‘attraction’ and ‘seduction’. She is surrounded by the detritus of adult life – what looks like passport photos, identity cards, possibly a payslip or official document, as well as sunglasses, a hat and novelty tights. Alongside the photography equipment and photographs, is a transparent shirt and a ‘slinky’. For me, this image captures that moment when a young woman emerges as an adult with her own clear identity and character. She is saying, ‘this is who I am’.
These photographs are autobiographical – the items from popular culture are the artist’s own childhood treasures, with models posing as her younger self. In many ways, the images of childhood and adolescence are universal, at least in Western culture, but seen through the lens of the war in Ukraine, they become far more poignant. Is it possible to maintain the innocence and naivety of childhood when your home has been invaded? What happens to the hearts and minds of the children and young people who grow up in such circumstances? How do you hold on to your heritage when your country is fighting for its independence? Polina Polikarpova’s series Childhood Ballad is a glimpse into the childhood of one person, yet at the same time, the significant questions it raises are inherent across the nation.
