A Person Without the Human

One of the artist’s most important series — “Kyiv Diary” — was created during the Maidan. Events and images, rumors and experiences from the story “being created today,” Ralko depicted in almost 400 A4-sized drawings. “Our people understood everything; they looked at the drawings literally through my eyes, while abroad they said the drawings were gloomy, asking: is this really reality, isn’t it a sign, a metaphor? There were fragments of a torn-off hand — we read in the news that some guy had his hands torn off. […] This, on the one hand, is symbolic reality, and on the other — pure and literal,” Ralko commented.

Although many of the artist’s drawings have a documentary basis, they should not be viewed as documents of the time — rather, they are documents of experiences about the time. Modern media technologies often appeal to the emotional component: news tries to shock and excite. Ralko’s works are no less emotional in essence; they are the result of deeply felt emotions both by the artist herself and by her surroundings or strangers she happened to observe.

Once Vlada Ralko admitted that while creating her works, she was afraid to embellish one side — since the artist was not impartial. But her drawings turned out to be far from glorification: they contain fear and pain, but no courage or joy. If once Boris Mikhailov created his illness story appealing to Soviet reality, then Ralko recorded the illness story of the present — more precisely, the process of “infection”: despair and distortion of reality. Therefore, her heroes are “distorted,” their flesh often depicted as ugly and shocking. As art historian Oksana Barshynova aptly put it, “Kyiv Diary” is a visual experience of the “Ukrainian Apocalypse.”

The artist’s works turned out to be far from glorification: they contain fear and pain, but no courage or joy.

In some works of this series, the artist included quotes from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whom she was reading at the time and for whom the highest value is the human being. Ralko admitted that she is interested precisely in the nature of this “human.” “I am interested in the human — at the moments when it leaves a person or returns to them,” the artist said.

The central and first image from which the series began is a person in an eye suit. This real person, whom Ralko met during the Maidan, embodies many contexts: media dictatorship, inability to see independently, state control over society.

Under the Power of Khrushchyovkas

One of Ralko’s latest series — “The Ghost of Freedom” — is dedicated to public space. Stair landings and Soviet-era openings in her works “devour” personal space where a person can be free. The body is forced to adapt, shrink, bend, and twist to fit the environment. Under this architectural pressure, the body and the person themselves become surreal and deviant.

The series title immediately recalls several works. On one hand, it is a direct reference to Luis Buñuel’s 1974 film of the same name; on the other — to Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto,” where the ghost of communism haunts Europe.

The depicted space in Ralko’s work is predominantly Soviet architecture; her ghost of freedom is the unreflected past and present, pressing on the person with the walls of Khrushchyovkas, ruined playgrounds, and poor infrastructure. Such a past cannot be decommunized; it cannot be demolished like monuments to Soviet leaders because it remains unnoticed.

Gaping Vaginas

Art historian and critic Anya Bazdyreva notes that with her drawings Ralko “evokes disgust or even physiological and psychological discomfort,” and suggests viewing her work from the perspective of abject art — disgusting art. “In Ralko’s works, there is the whole set: repulsive division of the body, the image of which has specific connotations of identity, invasion into it and violation of its symbolic order. Moreover, hypertrophied female bodies with huge bloody wounds gaping vaginas — this is abject — the experience of becoming/destroying identity through rupture with the mother or literally coming out of her,” Bazdyreva writes.

Indeed, female images dominate Ralko’s works. In Ukrainian artistic tradition, they were mostly associated with the oppressed principle: for example, images of peasant women referred to the tragic history of the Ukrainian people. A woman always personified the land or the country, and a man — power over it. In Ralko, a woman appears in both positions — oppressed and oppressor; in her, the unsettled and power coexist.

Vlada Ralko has been developing her artistic practice since the mid-1990s. This was a time when many artists were forced to move into commerce and related professions, leaving art — some temporarily, some forever. Finding herself in this difficult historical moment, Ralko conveys human pain, experiences, and the tragedy of the time in her works — just as painfully and tragically.

In Ralko, a woman appears in both positions — oppressed and oppressor; in her, the unsettled and power coexist.