After the annexation of Crimea and the war that ensued in eastern Ukraine, not a few artists knew what their country would look like in 2022: devastating.
After all, they knew the violent Ukrainian-Soviet history and its echoes in the masterpieces of avant-garde cinema, above all the classic “Arsenal”, in which the Ukrainian-born Oleksandr Dovzhenko gave the civil war an amazingly unheroic touch in 1929.
The Steirischer Herbst allows the cinema innovator to meet some contemporary voices in a special exhibition.
Each of them develops their own perspective on the faltering "liberation" of their homeland, before the focus in autumn is on ignored wars and suppressed conflicts.
"The topic was fixed last year,
but the war far away has become a war near.
After February 24, I wanted to be specific and tailor everything to Ukraine,” said Moscow-born artistic director Ekaterina Degot.
That is why the curator duo Mirela Baciak and David Riff are now, unfortunately only for a month, focusing on recent examples of Ukrainian video and film art.
Lo and behold, many of the seven participants in Germany liked to draw hidden parallels, even before Vladimir Putin lapsed into a disinformation rhetoric that curiously juggled Nazi comparisons after the offensive had been launched.
For example, Mykola Ridnyi, born in Kharkiv in 1985.
In his film collage "Temerari" from 2021, a uniformed Putin appears on a T-shirt of right-wing populist Matteo Salvini, who is close to the Kremlin.
Anyone who thinks that T-shirt-wearing politicians have been trying to get power closer since Volodymyr Zelenskyj is thrown back on an agenda of the opposite side,
Sometimes Mussolini haunts the picture when he visits the Biennale in Venice, sometimes Tommaso Marinetti, his future Minister of Culture, can be seen in photographs during his visit to Russia in 1914, when he is not delivering brutal messages from the "Futurist Manifesto" to the audience on shaky film footage Now broadcasts and sounds amazingly compatible: "We want to glorify war - this only hygiene in the world -, militarism, patriotism, the deeds of destruction by the anarchists, the beautiful ideas for which one dies, and the contempt of women."
It is not just on social media, as Ridnyi shows, that the aesthetics of muscle-bound Italian neo-fascists or Ukrainian ultra-nationalists that glorify destruction live on.
He finds them in souvenir shops in Italy and in the derogatory reactions when he comes out as Ukrainian.
While Putin pretends to denazify Ukraine, right-wing extremists who have arrived prefer to fight on the side of Russia.
At the same time, Putin is increasing the cult surrounding himself, using the Z symbol and speaking at mass rallies about the cleansing power of violence.
Ridnyi reacts to the confusion that empties meaning or, to put it another way, the peak of an illogical culmination, at the end of which reality stands on its head,
This conceptual archeology counteracts the artistically animated and extremely intimate collage “Letter to a Turteltaube” by Dana Kavelina, who was born in 1995 in Melitopol, which is now occupied.
Made between 2018 and 2020, the cinematic anti-war poem combines amateur footage shot during the 2014 war in Donbass, archival footage from the 1930s, when the region became the focus of Stalinist industrialization, and Kavelina's own graphic work and surreal mise-en-scène.
In the center is a raped young woman.
In a hallucinatory monologue that gets under your skin, she tells of the traumata and dreams of the victims of a misogynist male cult.
She doesn't feel "cleansed" at all, much more as a representative of a vulnerable Donbass body, if not just mines,
The anonymous video archive of a Telegram channel, compiled by activist citizens, shows what happens every day beyond the preselected news images on a tiny screen.
As you get closer, you can see tanks exploding in the distance and are relieved at the seemingly remote battle, only for the next image to bring the soldiers' bodies, or what's left of them, in pitilessly closer, leaving no doubt that this "special operation" is theirs ' gave a dirty rather than ego-boosting ending.
There is also no sign of cleanliness in the refugee camp in the transit zone between southern Ukraine and the region around Odessa.
It was here that Pavel Brăila met 72-year-old pensioner Vera Derevyanko.
She refuses to move to better accommodation,
It is no coincidence that the video that was made in early 2022 is called “Vera means belief”, because even if the elderly woman writes disillusioned poems in the Ukrainian-Russian mixed language Surschyk and affirms that she has never really thought about her nationality, she also embodies one after decades of violence in the will to survive, which has passed over the DNA, and which is defiantly able to triumph over the most recent setback.
A War Afar: Contested Ukraine in Video Art and Film.
In the Neue Galerie Graz, until August 1st.
Instead of a catalog there is a free brochure.