SOSкa Group. Memorial. 2009. Installation, vertical video projection (5′32″)
Work Description
This video continues the group’s work on the theme of the art market, rural life, and culture, specifically the ritual of lamentation. In Ukrainian ritual tradition, lamentation for deceased relatives is common throughout the country, but it varies significantly from village to village. In some localities, only close relatives are allowed to participate in the mourning process, while in other regions, professional ritual mourners are hired [1]. In their work, the artists enact a funeral lamentation ritual involving hired mourners who lament the end of contemporary art alongside a slide projection of iconic works of modernism and contemporary art.
As in Barter, the collective refers to stars and leading figures in the history of 20th – early 21st-century art: Kandinsky, Warhol, Duchamp, Hirst, and others. SOSka works with issues of symbolic capital related to owning works by canonized art figures, as well as the peak point of art commercialization embodied by Damien Hirst’s works. His works remained at the peak of the global art market even at the start of the 2008 international economic crisis but later lost this stability amid the economic downturn [2]. Accordingly, the question of the “death of art” raised by the artists is revealed in a historical retrospective: from the denial of the continuation of art by conceptual avant-gardists in the early 20th century to total capitalist commodification in the 2000s.
Double Game, First Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art ARSENALE 2012, exhibition view
Double Game, First Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art ARSENALE 2012, exhibition view
The object of criticism chosen by the SOSka group proved to be consonant with the further development of art. The global economic downturn also influenced the reassessment of then-current trends in visual culture and contributed to a turn toward critical discourse. Issues of education, laboratory and research practices in art, as well as socially critical statements that concerned the group, began to prevail in the following decades.
- Hnatyuk Volodymyr, Svientsitskyi Ilarion. Funeral Lamentations. Funeral Customs and Rituals. From the editors // Ethnographic Collection. Vol. XXXI–XXXII. Lviv: Shevchenko Scientific Society, 1912.
- Charlotte Higgins. When the bottom fell out of the art market. The Guardian. 15 Oct 2009.
