Arsenal Municipal Gallery
6-11/2023
opening: November 6, 2023, 6:00 p.m
curator: Marek Wasilewski
The exhibition of Vlada Ralko and Volodymyr Budnikov is a spontaneous show of works created during the residency in Poznań as part of the program run by the Wielka 19 Association. The most important context for Ralko and Budnikov’s artistic activities is currently the Russian aggression in Ukraine. The artists create extremely intense works, resulting not only from thoughts and feelings, but also from the existential knowledge of the horror of war, the refugee experience and working in the situation of artistic nomads.
Vlada Ralko is a graduate of the Ukrainian Academy of Fine Arts (currently the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture) in Kiev. In his artistic practice, he focuses on painting, drawing, works on paper and spatial objects. She is the author of poetry and essays, as well as critical articles on the relationship between art, philosophy and politics. Volodymyr Budnikov graduated from the Kiev State Institute of Art (currently the National Academy of Arts and Architecture), where he is a professor. He mainly uses the painting medium, he also creates works on paper and objects.
The artists point out that the war in Ukraine brought to the fore with great intensity the existential issue of life and death. This war also made us realize that the line of contact between what is intimate and personal and what is political, public and social cannot be ignored. The word “anatomy” comes from the Greek anatomē – “dissection (corpse)”, cutting, from anatémnein – “to cut”. It is a branch of biology that deals with the study of the structure of organisms. position, shape, composition and evolution of organs, tissues and cells. This term, which is colloquially associated with a complete documentary and even bureaucratic register of individual fragments of all known living organisms, does not refer to a dry description, but contains the performativity of violence, which consists in dismembering organisms that are the object of research. Anatomy defines the boundaries of organs and bodies, what is their internal structure, what is visible from the outside and what is hidden under the surface of the skin. Ralko’s and Budnikov’s paintings and drawings act as scalpels that cut the politician’s body, dissect the organs, extract individual fragments from her wartime corpse and subject them to meticulous analysis. These are “questions to the visible” asked without pathos, as they called their exhibition in Białystok in 2022.
Volodymyr Budnikov associates the structure of the landscape torn apart by bullets and rockets with the inside of the human body. In his works, the decomposed structures of demolished houses, battered, war-torn landscapes seem to merge with fragments of ribs and spines. Vlada Ralko, inspired by the works of Rembrandt and Joachim Beuckelaer, analyzes violence and the pornographic attraction of death to show how this war blinds consciences and makes the perpetrators of crimes forget about their responsibility.
Thinking about the title of the exhibition – “Political Anatomy” – it is impossible not to associate it with von Clausewitz’s famous statement that war is a continuation of politics by other means. The author of these words also said that war is an act of violence, and there are no limits to its use. Ralko and Budnikov disagree that war is a form of politics over which individuals have no influence. Their work is an artistic and political protest against aggression.
In the works of Vlada Ralko and Volodymir Budnikov we can see not only emotions and feelings, but also the vivisection of politics in its most extreme incarnation, which is limitless naked violence. The works they create on paper are multi-layered visual essays whose task is, just like during an autopsy, to bring to the surface what is hidden. The artists try to show, without unnecessary pathos, how the experience of the trauma of war translates into the human body, which in the process also becomes a political body.
Marek Wasilewski
