Daniil Revkovskiy and Andriy Rachinskiy

HOW ARTISTS REVKOVSKIY AND RACHYNSKIY, WHILE RESEARCHING THE INTERACTIONS OF THE PEOPLE WITH THE SOVIET COMMUNIST SYMBOLICS IN UKRAINE AND THE USSR IN 2018–1990, FORGOT TO INCLUDE THE VIDEO FROM 1991, 2020, 14’12’’

The videos found online present the reverse chronology of Ukrainians’ relationship with the Soviet past and its ghosts, which periodically return to the political and everyday sphere. The deeper we travel in time, the more unintelligible the images and sound become. This takes place up until the initial years of independence, when the people’s memory of the USSR was still alive, but technical capabilities only allowed capturing history in a fragmented way. The modern film footage from the era of accessible public documentation takes viewers back to the recent past, to the events and social practices that we have not yet forgot, but in whose authenticity we no longer believe.

ANDRIY RACHINSKIY, *1990, and DANIIL REVKOVSKIY, *1993, is a creative duo from Kharkiv who link different formats of artistic practices such as installations, re-enactments and video, and explore the contexts and landscapes of the industrial regions of Ukraine. They both graduated from the State Academy of Design and Arts in Kharkiv, where they majored in graphic design. In 2010 they created a public page “Pamjat” (memory) in the Vkontakte social network with the aim of researching the collective memory of post-Soviet territory. This project was the starting point of their collaboration. They received the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2020 public choice award for the Hooligans project.

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