Let Us Not Fall Asleep While Walking
David Denil
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In 1991, Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union in the aftermath of its dissolution at the end of the Cold War. Following independence, Ukraine declared itself a neutral state. In 2013, protests against the government of President Yanukovych broke out in downtown Kiev after the government made the decision to suspend the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement and seek closer economic ties with Russia. This began a several-months-long wave of demonstrations and protests known as the Euromaidan, which later escalated into the 2014 Ukrainian revolution that ultimately resulted in the overthrowing of Yanukovych and the establishment of a new government. These events precipitated the annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014, and the War in Donbass in since March 2014.
‘Let Us Not Fall Asleep While Walking’ depicts the psychological state of this Ukraine looking at its future while haunted by its past and memory. The work is a metaphorical representation of the everyday life encountered by the Ukrainian people where time seems frozen but dreams for an independent future still linger.
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With a background in engineering David Denil’s photographical interest started in 2014 by seeing Jacob Riis’s ‘How the Other Half Lives’. Fascinated by the excessive presence of light, the striking compositions and shadows encapsulating daily life in combination with the strategically use of the medium challenged David to explore contemporary subject matter. Within his first project Let Us Not Fall Asleep While Walking, David Denil started to translate the psychological dimensions of Ukraine as a collision between past, present and future.
Mentored by the Magnum photographer Carl De Keyzer, he chose not to show the war in the east, but to focus on the aspects of life presented to him in the capital Kiev. By his active presence his work functions as an extension on the early 20th century documentary approach and tends to reveal universal questions rather then to depict actual proof of fact.
While working on two new projects, David is finishing the dummy book of Let Us Not Fall Asleep with the input of British Ukrainian researcher and cultural manager Myroslava Hartmond. Within the book the images will be interconnected with referential sources, testimonies and reflections on the impact that both media and politics have on the hybrid war that is putting strains on the Ukrainian dream and experience of freedom. This book will be published at the end of 2018, exactly 5 years after the start of the hybrid war.