SOSкa Group. Trapped on the Streets. 2006. Action in public space
Work Description
This is the first work of the SOSka group, from which their collective practice is counted. For this project, Hanna Kryventsova, Serhiy Popov, and Mykola Ridnyi created masks with the faces of then politicians: the President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, and People’s Deputy Yulia Tymoshenko. Appealing to populist agitation campaigns — up to direct bribery methods, when political parties gained voter support through the distribution of merchandise with their own identity and even food products — the group completely reverses the situation and turns these politicians into beggars. Thus, on the eve of the 2006 parliamentary elections, the artists in these masks begged on the streets and in metro cars in Kyiv and Kharkiv.
The actions took place a few years after the end of the Orange Revolution, when society was deeply disappointed by the actions and level of responsibility of the politicians of that time. Despite the formal positioning of the main candidates and corresponding parties as opponents, the artists arranged their joint march, because the methods of influence and media campaigns of different sides, as well as the results of political activity, ultimately did not give fundamentally different results.
