Opening reception Thursday, October 30, 2025, 6–8 p.m.
UKRAINE (working title)
Text by Stanislava Ovchinnikova, curator of the exhibition
“This is not a film about the war”,(1) proclaims the anonymous author in the five-hour-long found footage work Watch War / Смотреть войну (2018). “This is a film about the image of war seen from one’s home.”(2)
I, too, am inclined to begin by refusing the immediately apparent—by stating, this is not an exhibition about the war, this is an exhibition about appearances that the war makes on the screens, streets, and bodies of those of us far from the frontlines. But to follow through on such an inclination would be to suggest that an arrowhead can strike without a shaft—that is, that contemporary warfare can be held separate from contemporary media. Which is, of course, untrue.(3) It is as crucial as ever to pay attention to the umbilical connection between the war, its mediated sight (a photograph, a video, a text), and the witness of it. Thus, this exhibition speaks of war as it exists today: inseparable from the lens through which one learns to see, or aims to kill.(4)
Ukraine (working title) presents three works by Sasha Kurmaz, Lada Nakonechna, and Mykola Ridnyi, created as a reflection on the conditions of life under the war that Russia started in Ukraine in 2014. The artists consider how violence is hidden, distorted, or made perceptible in image, language, body, and the media.
In a video work, State of Emergency (2018), Sasha Kurmaz brings together personal and found documentary footage portraying life in Ukraine during the first four years of the war. Across four channels and forty minutes, we see frontlines, fighting in the Ukrainian parliament, citizens protesting illegal construction, burning churches, exploding cars, and numerous other scenes of everyday brutality—or brutality as it’s becoming the everyday. Here, Kurmaz draws a connection between the war, then unfolding on approximately 10% of Ukrainian territory, and the violence, poverty, and political instability present across the whole of Ukraine, as its consequence. And if you find yourself feeling disoriented trying to follow numerous political events unfolding across the four channels at the same time, all the better. Holding attention on multiple crises without missing a crucial detail is a useful skill to train during wartime.
Still, despite the multiplication of images, much remains unseen. Mykola Ridnyi’s Blind Spot (2014) takes its title from ophthalmology: the small area on the retina that lacks light-sensitive receptors—a gap that in healthy vision goes unnoticed, automatically compensated for by the brain. Ridnyi considers what happens when disease makes this blind spot apparent. Juxtaposing visual distortions caused by conditions such as scotoma or glaucoma with imagery from the war-torn east of Ukraine, he examines how media propaganda similarly impairs our capacity to perceive reality.
And it’s not just vision. Language operates as another filter through which we build an understanding of the world. In Lada Nakonechna’s installation The So-Called (2015), words—many reminiscent of those saturating the media landscape surrounding Ukraine at the time—constitute an integral component of the tools of aggression. By making apparent the language’s ability to both obscure and concretize violence, she inspects the role that it plays in the propagation of conflict.
The exhibition’s expanded program includes an invitation to Watch War / Смотреть войну, a found footage film that was published on YouTube in 2018 (https://youtu.be/gdSgzriu89I?si=OPxaR9-dAUUo1XsO). Edited by a person who chose to remain anonymous, the work brings together videos made and uploaded online by 443, similarly unnamed, eyewitnesses—civilians in war-torn regions, soldiers at the frontline—of the 2014–2018 period of the Russian war against Ukraine.
Beyond creating an extensive cinematic document of that time, the editor also formulates a set of critical statements on the role of the camera, montage, and spectatorship in the war. These statements, typed in Russian, are interspersed throughout the film. “This war was started in order to be seen,” one of them reads. “What will happen if we stop watching?”(5)
ENDNOTES:
(1) Translation into English by Stanislava Ovchinnikova. Original text, in Russian, reads: Это не фильм о войне. (Anonymous. Смотреть войну [Watch war]. 2018. Youtube, https://youtu.be/gdSgzriu89I?si=3dvCxRGIgP8E7TYx. 2:09:57)
(2) Translation into English by Stanislava Ovchinnikova. Original text, in Russian, reads: Это фильм о том, какой можно увидеть войну, оставаясь дома. (Anonymous. Смотреть войну [Watch war]. 2018. Youtube, https://youtu.be/gdSgzriu89I?si=3dvCxRGIgP8E7TYx. 2:10:24)
(3) For the contextually relevant discussion on the role of media in hybrid warfare (often deployed by Russia), see.: Rácz, András. Russia’s Hybrid War in Ukraine: Breaking the Enemy’s Ability to Resist. Finnish Institute of International Affairs, 2015, https://fiia.fi/en/publication/russias-hybrid-war-in-ukraine.
(4) The same film, Watch war (2018), does a brilliant job making this connection apparent by, for example, superimposing cinematic terms— “панорамирование/точка сьемки/shot/средний план/соотношение сторон/zoom/видоискатель/внутрикадровый монтаж/глубина кадра” [“panning, camera position, shot, medium shot, aspect ratio, zoom, viewfinder, intra-frame montage, depth of field”—transl. S. Ovchinnikova] onto the footage of a targeting process done through a display inside a tank. (Anonymous. Смотреть войну [Watch war]. 2018. Youtube, https://youtu.be/gdSgzriu89I?si=3dvCxRGIgP8E7TYx. 2:32:05-2:34:13)
(5) Translation into English by S. Ovchinnikova. Original text, in Russian, reads: Эта война начата для того чтобы быть увиденной. Что произойдет, если мы перестанем смотреть? (Anonymous. Смотреть войну [Watch war]. 2018. Youtube, https://youtu.be/gdSgzriu89I?si=3dvCxRGIgP8E7TYx. 3:04:00-3:04:24)
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UKRAINE (working title)
Teemu Mäki’s text about the exhibition
Here’s another view into the exhibition of Ukrainian art in Critical Gallery (31.10.–30.11.2025). I hope it adds something to curator Stanislava Ovchinnikova‘s text.
The exhibition features works by Sasha Kurmaz, Lada Nakonechna, and Mykola Ridnyi. As a bonus, we offer a link to a 5-hour video compilation by an anonymous author about the war in Ukraine and related events. The bonus is not shown in the gallery, but you can watch the it at home whenever you want.
Sasha Kurmaz’s State of Emergency (2018) is a 40-minute documentary video about Ukraine, showing how Russia’s invasion in 2014 affected society even before the current major war.
If you watch State of Emergency without knowing anything about Russia’s war against Ukraine, the film seems to depict human stupidity, prejudice, and malice on a fairly universal level. The video clips contain homophobic hate speech, dehumanization of the enemy, xenophobic propaganda by “patriots,” and the church’s support for the war of aggression, and so on. There is also a lot of physical violence and very little sympathy for its victims. The film can be seen as a melancholic and pacifist self-criticism directed at all people. If the viewer knows enough about Russia’s war against Ukraine, the film has also another message: the film is clearly against Russia’s war of aggression and shows how Russian propaganda and hybrid warfare are destroying Ukraine both on the front lines and behind them.
Kurmaz’s film is rich and original, even though it was made without money — the work consists of borrowed material and material filmed by the artist himself. Kurmaz has divided the image into four frames for almost the entire duration of the film, meaning that the viewer has to follow four separate image streams simultaneously. This is not just a way to fit four times as much material into the film, but also a way to juxtapose different perspectives and chains of events simultaneously. The viewer is forced to consider the differences between the four different perspectives and the cause-and-effect relationships, while at the same time being exposed to a flood of stimuli and information that is difficult to take in. The work is restless, internally contradictory, but stunningly compelling — much more compelling than a more restrained and polished reportage “made on a proper budget” would likely be. Despite the grainy image and bad sound quality, the work has a sense, taste and smell of reality that brings the viewer exceptionally close to grassroots events. It is precisely the fact that the work does not have the polished image quality, emotionally appealing sound design, and dramaturgy of normal, “high-quality film and television expression” that liberates the work and brings it particularly close to the viewer. I am not suggesting that good documentary films cannot be made with big budgets and large production teams. I am simply stating that good documentary films can also be made without big resources — and the results can be just as good and certainly different from those produced by normal production machinery.
The style of the film is reminiscent of early scratch videos, i.e., the video art of the 1980s and 1990s that focused on collage techniques, i.e., cutting up and recycling existing material in a way that created new meanings and new experiences. It also brings to mind early hip hop, which was based on sampling without permission.
Mykola Ridnyi’s Blind Spot (2014–) is a series of photographs depicting the destruction caused by Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. However, the series is not documentary in nature, but rather conceptual art. As the name suggests, each image is dominated by a black spot, a blind spot that prevents the viewer from seeing the subject at the center of the image. Some of the images in the series reverse this principle. In these images, the image surface is mainly black, but at some point there is a “seeing spot” from which a detail of the image subject can be seen, such as a broken window. The work encourages us to think about what our own blind spots are, what we do not see even though we think we do? What do we not understand even though we think we do? How is it possible that even though the world has been following the war in Ukraine since 2014, many people do not see what is really happening — and do not understand how they themselves have directly or indirectly influenced the war and its course?
Lada Nakonechna’s installation The So-Called (2015) deals with warfare waged with words. The work consists of stones wrapped in crumpled pieces of paper bearing single words such as neo-Nazi, terrorist, or patriot. Words like these are weapons that divide people into friends and enemies. The enemy is distanced and dehumanized — and one’s own group is given the mantle of a hero. After that, bloodshed is easy.
The work is extremely simple in form and content. Some may find it banal and boring, but I think it is moving and illustrative in a wonderful way. The idea may seem trite, but it is worth going to see the work in person to find out what kind of physical and holistic experience it generates in you.
The bonus part of the exhibition is a compilation of videos edited by an unknown author, which hundreds of unknown people have uploaded to the internet: Watch War / Смотреть войну (2018, https://youtu.be/gdSgzriu89I?si=OPxaR9-dAUUo1XsO). The theme is the early stages of the war in Ukraine in 2014–2018, when Russia had occupied Crimea and war was already raging between Ukraine and Russia in eastern Ukraine. Russia had not yet started a full-scale war at that point, but was trying to gain control of Ukraine by waging an unofficial war and orchestrating a “separatist movement” that fought on behalf of Putin’s Russia, for the benefit of Putin’s Russia. The five-hour compilation is exhausting on the one hand, fascinating on the other — and informative in any case. Watching it requires good media literacy and a critical eye — but so does life in general, if you want to maintain your freedom.
Teemu Mäki, 24.10.2025.
