Artist
Lesia Vasylchenko
Lesia Vasylchenko (b. 1990 Ukraine, based in Oslo, Norway) is an artist and curator. Her work with installations, moving images and photography raises questions around temporality, history and memorialising. Vasylchenko is a co-curator of the artist-run gallery space Podium and a founder of STRUKTURA. Time, a cross-disciplinary initiative for research and practice within the framework of visual arts, media archaeology, literature, and philosophy. She holds a degree in Journalism from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and Fine Arts from Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her works have been shown among others at Louvre Museum, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Haugar Art Museum, Tønsberg; Tenthaus Gallery, Oslo; The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale.
About the ruins
Lesia Vasylchenko’s work transpires as a reflection on the standstills of our historical moment and the impossibility of overcoming it, based on the idea that progress has created in our societies. Images represent their technologies and univocal ideology, even when we don’t see them directly, like in stamps and in transparent binary computational infrastructures that have become meaningful in propagating an idea of futurity that Modernity envisioned to colonize not only land and people but the future. So, in her work, we take shelter inside such transparency, where physical structures mirror invisible infrastructures. On the surface, photography is mapping and building nodes of propriety, leaving no space for contemplation. Distances disappear despite going hand in hand with alienation and forgetting our next of kin. There is no meaningful distinction between past and future, pushing us to analyze our presentness.