This project is dedicated to the victims of the terrorist attack on the Kakhovka HPP on 06.06.2023.
The number of deaths and the scale of destruction have not yet been calculated since most of the flooded territory is under Russian occupation.
85 minutes.
85 minutes is the time I’ve spent in an aquarium filled with river water in an attempt to realize the tragedy.
Aquarium. An aquarium or just a glass flask resembles a container for anatomical exhibits. In the same way, Ukraine now reminds me of a huge experiment, which the entire world is watching through a so-called transparent wall: how can we all handle it here. The world wants to see if we are heroic enough, smart enough, do we have corruption. They want to see what new forms of overcoming the invasion our military will invent. This glass wall also represents the endless screens of gadgets. Sometimes I joke that Netflix has prepared the world well for war, so it’s difficult to surprise people with anything.
Frustration.
Like all Ukrainians, I live in circumstances where you are constantly faced with information and events that are impossible to process, accept or understand. Not all Ukrainians joined the military, not everyone has the opportunity to directly express their anger or take revenge.
Frustration. We all suffer irreversible losses here, every day our friends and people around us are dying: old and young people and even children. Animals and the entire ecosystems are dying, cities that we love are being destroyed. We lose our homes, our lifestyles. Our loved ones are now scattered around the world. This is such a usual thing for every Ukrainian, and it’s not a popular topic to talk about here. Therefore, most of us choose to hide our feelings, and to hide from our feelings ourselves.
You get used to enduring inconveniences: sitting as long as necessary in a bomb shelter, spending 24 hours on the floor in an evacuation train, living without electricity, living in foreign cities where everything is so alien to you. So spending 85 minutes in this cold water wasn’t extraordinary for me.
I just toughed it out a little.
Closed space is about closed feelings.
Ophelia.
Full video performance
For some reason, this image arose in my mind - a woman wearing a white dress, laying in water. When I saw the result, I realized how terrifying it is when looking through the lens of the Kherson tragedy. In the information space, there are very few statistics related to the dead victims, because most of them are the elderly in the occupied territories. Only a few can be seen in photos on social media.
My Ophelia is an unknown woman in the cold water of the Dnieper.
Experiment.
Frustration is very difficult to withstand and it was the aquarium that turned out to be a good place for reflecting. A lot became clear to me when I was there. Indeed, at the beginning of the project, most of all I thought about the frame, the camera battery, where to take the aquarium and how to transport it. I did not think at all how I myself would feel inside the aquarium.