The next DOUBLE FEATURE will host the artist collective Open Group. In their video work “Repeat after Me II”, they examine the extent of the Russian war of aggression using onomatopoeic reports from Ukrainian war refugees.
“My Name is Hanna, I am from Merefa, a town in the Kharkiv region. In September 2022, we came to Ireland,” a woman narrates, sitting in front of a newly built bungalow somewhat reminiscent of a youth leisure center. The camera switches to a close-up of her face before the woman expresses the following words, which sound like a headline: “The Tornado multiple rocket launch system.” A subhead explains details on these multi-missile artillery systems that from the back of a truck fire missiles that are mainly not remote controlled. Since 2014, Russia has repeatedly deployed such weapon systems in Ukraine in order to carry out large-scale waves of attacks on civilian areas – a clear war crime. Concentrating hard, Hanna then offers her onomatopoetic interpretation of the machinery of war: “THUhsh THUhsh THUhsh THUhsh THUhsh” and then calls on the viewers to “Repeat after me”, while the onomatopoetic sounds she makes are also subtitled.
“Repeat after me” is likewise the name of the video piece produced by the Open Group collective, which comes from Ukraine. As early as 2022, the group which is made up of artists Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach and Anton Varga, brought out a video with that title. In it, internally displaced persons in a refugee camp close to Kiev appear before the camera and offer an onomatopoetic emulation of the sounds of the war that Russia has been waging against Ukraine since Feb. 24, 2022, and again call on the audience to repeat the sounds as if performing karaoke. When curator Marta Czyż invited the collective to exhibit in the Polish pavilion at the Venice Biennale the Open Group opted this year to produce a new version of the video – and both variants are on show in Venice.
“Repeat after me II”
For the more recent version, the three artists sought out Ukrainian war refugees elsewhere in the world, namely in Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Austria, Ireland, and the United States. As with the earlier video, the formal sequence always remains the same; in the 40-minute film, the refugees always briefly introduce themselves before the paths and means of war come into focus: Kalashnikov machineguns, ballistic missiles, air-raid sirens, drones, tanks, and artillery, and the interviews each copy the sounds they make. Subheads explain the respective background to the weapons, meaning how many of the specific tool of war Russia has deployed since 2022 and/or since 2014 in the Ukraine, which of them were supplied by Iran or North Korea, how many of them are still stockpiled in Russia, and what number of the particular weapon the Ukraine military has already managed to destroy.
The text panels offer an intellectual understanding of the weapons systems or the situation on the ground; however, the full scale of the war becomes clearer when the persons in front of the camera talk about their lives. For example, there is Ira, who in 2022 fled from Chernihiv to Vilnius. Her neighborhood was subjected to massive bombardment only shortly after the beginning of the Russian war of aggression. Fearfully lodged in the cellar, they heard a woman screaming outside and eventually managed to get the woman into the hiding place; wounded by a splitter bomb the injured women died before their eyes in the cellar. In the tired and disillusioned eyes of Ira and the others questioned, we thus see a reflection of the real horror of what they experienced, the experience of war, fleeing, and displacement to a foreign country, with all those problems that this involves in today’s world, and with no end in sight. The title “Repeat after me” can thus be grasped in a dual sense as repetition, namely the literal repeating of those sounds of war and the knowledge that each person’s fate as presented will for the time being also apply to many other people in Ukraine.
“Explosions Near the Museum”
The other film that the Open Group artist collective has selected for our Double Feature also highlights the consequences of the Russian war of aggression. Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei produced their short film “Explosions Near the Museum” (2023) with a small film team in December 2022, shortly after the liberation of the south Ukraine port city of Cherson, in the local history museum. Founded in 1890, the museum contained one of the largest collection of artefacts of Ukraine cultural history, above all from prehistoric times. The largest part of the collection was systematically plundered by the Russian occupying forces and about 80 percent of the holdings were transferred to the art museum in Simferopol on the Crimea peninsula, annexed by the Russians in contravention of international law in 2014.
While the soundtrack plays clear sounds of explosions from the front line not far off, the camera pans quietly round the galleries in the plundered museum, which the Russians have left in a chaotic state. A calm voice explains meanwhile offscreen what historical artefacts used to be in the now empty display cases or on the vacated plinths prior to the Russian plundering and which people hope will soon be on display again. The Scythian and Sarmatian burial objects, the rare ceramics, gold and silver artifacts, weapons, the entire coin collection, all of them violently seized and removed and all of them testimony to a Ukraine history that Russia has in the context of the war set out to dissolve completely and subordinate to a Russian narrative. “Explosions near the Museum” thus becomes a kind of objection to or refutation of that undertaking, as Yarema Malashchuk revealed in the journal “Texte zur Kunst”: “You cannot think metaphorically or ‘artistically’ about war crimes, above all not if you are yourself at the scene of the crime –the actual threat is too close for such reflection. We resolved to use the known rhetoric of absence in contemporary art in order to create (substitute) values – not because we can, but because we must.”
