Olexander Wlasenko: As We Slept
In Memory of the
Ukrainian Famine-Genocide 1932-33
The exhibition consists of
six large scale drawings of images appropriated from Soviet propaganda sources
that depict Socialist images of progress, prosperity and contentment. They
represent a state perpetuated and marketed illusion of Soviet reality. Juxtaposing this illusion are seven intimate
scaled white-washed wall drawings of famine victims in Soviet Ukraine 1932-33.
These represent a horrific reality that was consistently denied by the state
and became expunged from human memory. It is reality marketed as illusion. In
the West, these perceptions became the accepted mythology about the
Olexander Wlasenko’s
exhibition “seeks to puncture this totalitarian master narrative.” Son of a Holodomor survivor, Wlasenko
attempts to grapple with the monumental human tragedy that almost brought
extinction to his family. In his Artist
Statement, he declares “As a whole, this project explores the tension between
artifice and actuality, participating in the contemporary discourse around
ethics, identity and the rehabilitation of historical memory.”
“Throughout history, our
Ukrainian nation has suffered much injustice and pain in its efforts to
preserve our ancestral homeland. However, nothing surpasses the devastating
impact of The Holodomor – that man-made famine engineered by the
Stalinist Regime in 1932.” This
statement by Dr. Oleh Gerus, President of Oseredok, provided the context
for his opening remarks at the exhibition.
Characterizing this horrific occurrence as a “genocidal act”, he
unequivocally acknowledged Stalin’s deliberate policy of extermination and
referred to the recognition of The Holodomor as genocide by many
nations,
The imagery evoked by
Wlasenko is very powerful. The depiction of collective farm workers,
energetically harvesting a field of wheat, a quintessential Socialist Realist
image, is subverted by the white-washed images of the decomposing body of a man
and two fully dressed corpses lying contorted in a field. One of the drawings, Untitled (wheat
queens), depicts two strong women pouring an abundance of grain. Wlasenko
points out the disparity of this reality by drawing the viewer’s eye toward a
depiction of two destitute women standing over a corpse. In similar vein, he
contrasts a healthy looking group of school children with a white-washed image
of an orphan. “These poignant images present a human tragedy that unsettles our
perception of truth and calls attention to the seductive power of deception,”
writes Sophia Kachor, exhibition curator, in the Foreword to the exhibition
catalogue.
In her essay on Olexander
Wlasenko, Dr. Daria Zelska Darewych describes these drawings as an installation
piece, a complete entity of post-modern contemporary art. “By careful cropping
of Soviet propaganda photographs and blowing them up, as well as reproducing
published images of the Holodomor-Famine, Olexander Wlasenko
deconstructs both and questions accepted concepts of reality and history,” she
states. The ephemeral nature of the drawings depicting famine victims plays out
on several levels. The whitewash reflects the hard-line position of the
The exhibition will run
through to
SMK