Kiyanka Oksana Chepelyk works all over the world: in New York, she transforms statistics into a gesture of hope, and she helps the residents of the slums in Rio to “find” their city. At the same time, her art constantly returns to Ukrainian themes — thus the film “Chronicles of Fortinbras” becomes a metaphor for the relationship of Ukrainians with their past and themselves.
Artist of the world
Oksana Chepelyk began her artistic activity as an actress and dancer in the experimental theater “AAA” in the late 1980s. Her parents are architects and architectural historians, so art surrounded her from an early age. Today she works with painting, performance, video, and installation.
Chepelyk lived in Kyiv, but her creative interests from the very beginning were far from the mainstream of the local art scene of the 1990s. She was interested in topics of gender, power and governance, the internet — that is, those that resonated with international artistic processes.
Chepelyk creates complex multimedia projects “Genesis” and “Collider,” in which she explores how the modern world was formed. In the 2006 work “Beginning,” the artist launched a dirigible near the ruins of the World Trade Center. Data on birth rates, collected in real time, were projected onto it. This gesture symbolized the beginning of new life despite violence and terror.
A visually similar work was “Virtual Sea Tower,” created in 2000 in the Jacarezinho favela in Rio de Janeiro. The artist collected numerous interviews with favela residents who, although formally living in the “City of God,” were actually cut off from the ocean and other attractions of Rio. Discovering that the slum residents felt desperate due to living in a kind of “reservation,” Chepelyk offered them at least symbolically, for one evening, to become part of the city’s communal life. They raised a hot air balloon into the sky, onto which interviews with favela residents and images of the ocean were projected. Thus, the people from the favela seemed to dissolve into the ocean, joining an unknown life to them, erasing the boundaries in which they were forced to live.
Timelessness
Chepelyk actively used the opportunities of international art residencies, traveled a lot, and worked as a visiting lecturer. These trips allowed her to implement technologically complex ideas. It was in residencies that “A Piece of Shit” and “Favorite Toys of Leaders” were created — performative works in which the artist reflects on mechanisms of power through mass media, the internet, and analysis of sexual experience.
Although Chepelyk claims that all works created in residencies are “through the prism of Ukrainian experience,” she does not have many works that directly refer to Ukrainian history and culture. One of them was the film “Chronicles of Fortinbras” (2001), which seems to summarize a “decade of tectonic shifts in history.” In an era when “suffering became everyday,” the invisible traveler — the rider Fortinbras — becomes a chronicler. The film reflects the turmoil of a person living on the fragments of Europe, which is being reshaped after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the civil war in Yugoslavia.
Based on an essay by Oksana Zabuzhko, the film is a nonlinear journey intertwining chronicles of the past and present: it includes Yuri Gagarin’s space flight and the “Granite Revolution,” “Bloody Sunday,” “Money Laundered in New York,” “The Prosecutor General Arrested Yulia Tymoshenko,” “Putin’s Embrace.” The film captures the asynchrony inherent even today in Ukrainian society, when “the pre-industrial and post-industrial eras, childhood and old age of civilization have merged into one.”
Oblivion
One of the leitmotifs of the film is the search for oneself, the comprehension of lost time, attempts to restore or at least feel historical connections, the intention to think about the past, no matter how traumatic it was. One of Zabuzhko’s theses is the phenomenon of forgetting inherent to Ukraine: “Ukrainian culture does not know its own time flow,” says the writer. In her collection, Zabuzhko writes that instead of becoming “masters of time, we became its captives.”
The metaphor of forgetting trauma is also expressed in the main image of the film — a woman raped by two grotesque men who embody the totalitarian principle.
In the film, the heroine — a young woman in a pantsuit — ends up in some hangar, after which she loses her subjectivity: her body is tortured, undressed, painted, and shaved; it literally becomes a battlefield in a “card” game composed of news from newspapers of that time. It is painted over with black spray paint and then washed off. What does this ritual of washing mean — cleansing from an inconvenient past or a precondition for a new stumble on the same rake?
Throughout the film, the image of the heroine transforms — from an emancipated woman to a mutilated creature in Malvina’s wig, and then to the image of the Virgin Mary nursing an infant in the final scenes of the picture. The image of the Virgin Mary is interspersed with the depiction of the Oranta mosaic from St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv — a harbinger of hope and protector who promises that “the sun around you will not be shaken.”
Echoing Zabuzhko’s texts, Chepelyk raises questions of responsibility and acceptance of one’s own choice, gratitude for the life given to us. “Life without gratitude is a damn nasty thing,” says Zabuzhko.
“Chronicles of Fortinbras” is the finale of the endless “post-” Ukrainian history: “postcolonial, postindustrial, postsoviet.” All these “post-” according to Oksana Zabuzhko create this “parallel time” — the “only one that ultimately matters: human time — in all that is so poorly understood as their life.”