SOSкa Group. Fragments. 2013–2014. Found objects, two-channel video
Work Description
The impetus for creating this work was the destruction of the memorial plaque to the Ukrainian linguist and literary historian Yuriy Shevelyov in Kharkiv. In September 2013, just after public figures and activists installed the plaque with the permission of the city council, the city administration canceled this decision. After accusations against Shevelyov of collaborating with the Nazis during the occupation of Kharkiv, which the then mayor Hennadiy Kernes and the head of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration Mykhailo Dobkin spread on their social media pages, a group of men calling themselves employees of the municipal enterprise Zhilkomservice smashed the plaque [1]. After watching a news report about this event, Mykola Ridnyi and Serhiy Popov identified the location of the dumpster from the video and on the same day found the fragments of the slab. They exhibited them together with a fragment of the Lenin monument that stood near Bessarabskaya Square in Kyiv. In this way, the artists juxtaposed not only cases of destruction of monuments to figures representing opposite political vectors but also different forms of unauthorized destruction of historical heritage — both as a consequence of social protest and the effectively legitimized destruction of Ukrainian history with the support of pro-Russian representatives of the local authorities in Kharkiv.
After the Victory, exhibition view, YermilovCentre, 2014
After the Victory, exhibition view, YermilovCentre, 2014
Shards became the last collective artistic expression of the SOSka group. The work raises questions about the interconnection of ideology and culture, their mutual influence and manipulations, which later, during Russia’s war against Ukraine, became even more acute. According to the artists, these events resonate with the practices of state violence in Ukraine in the 1930s during the Soviet repressions [2].
