This exhibition is part of a larger project that tells the story of an engineer who tried to resist the "great terror" that began by order of the NKVD of the USSR N°00447. Over a year and a half (August 1937 - November 1938), more than 700,000 people were sentenced to death, 140,000 of which were in the UkranianSSR. It is important to note that it is impossible to determine the exact statistics, which differ in different sources. Also, these data do not have information about repressions in the territories of the TNR and Mongolian People's Republic controlled by the USSR.
What is called the "Great Terror" or "Yezhovshchina", or "Year 37" - affected all segments of the Ukrainian population from peasants, ethnic Poles, Germans, and other nationalities to virtually the entire leadership of the Ukrainian SSR and significant figures in the NKVD and the army. Metallurgy also did not stand aside: almost all directors of metallurgical plants were sentenced to death. Their families and entourage fell victim to mass purges. Any malfunctions, failures of the Stakhanovist pace were considered sabotage and espionage.
This exhibition is a story about an engineer from Krivorozhstal, who is hiding from reprisals with his family under the building of the plant. The engineer is "hunted" by the search groups of police and the NKVD. The exposition presents his plans of intervention, which he creates for the newspaper "Izvestia". During the interventions, he depicts caricatured portraits of enemies of the people (to which he is also referred) on the walls of the facades of industrial buildings. These actions take on the features of temporary protest artistic practice.
Curator: Ksenia Malykh.
"Tailings dam. Engineer". 2021.
"Tailings dam. Engineer". Voloshyn Gallery. Kyiv, Ukraine. 2021