The new exhibition is a continuation of the “Tailings Dam” series, the first part of which was exhibited at the PinchukArtCentre and the second — at Voloshyn Gallery, both in 2021. The new body of work (collages, videos, drawings on paper) tells the story of Klavdiya Chervonyk, who worked as a construction worker at the Pivdennyi Machine-Building Plant (hereinafter referred to as Pivdenmash) from approximately 1945 to 1983. The plant produced launch vehicles for nuclear weapons. At some point, Klavdiya's life turned into paranoia, as she began to have the same dream — “a vegetables garden near the house, on which various types of Pivdenmash rockets fall”. The feeling that this dream would become a reality made Klavdiya's life a nightmare and drove her to suicide.
“The new part of the series ‘Tailings Dam’ by Daniil Revkovskyi and Andrii Rachynskyi is part of an imaginary museum of the demise of human civilisation they have created. The museum itself exists in the future, and the artists are researchers there, or maybe they are not there at all.
The purpose of this museum is to explore the causes of humanity’s extinction, and from episode to episode, new scenarios of how we have brought ourselves to an end are revealed to us. The first episode was about the depletion of the Earth’s resources — how by extracting everything ‘useful’ from the earth, we eventually drowned in the dumping of minerals. The earth’s landscape became completely man-made and poisonous, and eventually swallowed us up. Then there was the story of the victim of the Great Terror — in Soviet times, when the state leadership decided to get rid of thousands of ‘superfluous’ people. At that time the paranoia of the leaders turned almost the entire population into paranoids.
The next series of archaeology from the future are already dedicated to the wars that for current us have taken place in the past. Although today we perceive the wars that took place on our land differently, we remember them differently. The missiles and shells developed during and after these wars, which the country that inherited the Great Terror bombards us with now, do not allow us to forget about them. Starting with the Engineer, the story becomes personified – fictional people who could well have existed because they are woven from real historical circumstances.
In ‘Let the Dream Follow the Night,’ characters whose fates are distant both geographically and historically come to us with their dreams and eerie premonitions. The beautiful landscapes of the Carpathians, painted by a World War I soldier, carry a disturbing message and a slow wait anticipation of a certain death. The obsessive dreams of a Pivdenmash employee, in which the missiles she approved herself at work, inevitably fly into her garden.
Six months of painting and assembling these works were spent in anxiety about their potential destruction by a missile strike or falling debris of something that appears in our sky from time to time. The X-22, Tochka OTR-21, R- 36M are depicted. For many of us, these abbreviations meant nothing until a couple of years ago. Recreated with painstaking attention to detail, they are heading to the garden — to a small, decorative, almost cute natural world.
Perhaps at that moment, a second before the rocket hit the tomatoes mixed with weeds, Klavdiya Chervonyk had woken up.”
Text by Ksenia Malykh.
Curator: Ksenia Malykh.
"Let the Dream Follow the Night". 2024.
"Let the Dream Follow the Night". Voloshyn Gallery. Kyiv, Ukraine. 2024.
