Focus: Ukraine Video Art

We were delighted of our collaboration with Videocity for this final program of our third edition of the WF Online Series. Videocity, established in 2013 in Basel, Switzerland, stands as an international public art project that bridges the gap between video art and diverse audiences in both indoor and outdoor public spaces, including unconventional locations.

In light of the ongoing Russian war on Ukraine, Videocity has joined forces with institutions in Switzerland and beyond to curate a compelling showcase featuring the works of various Ukrainian video artists. We presented a selection of both newer and older works, addressing poignant concerns related to the current geopolitical situation. We were honored to be a part of this meaningful collaboration featuring a selection of works from the archive of this specific Videocity project.

Our program was available on our website for a week, starting from February 8, exploring the powerful narratives and artistic expressions that emerge from this unique fusion of video art and socio-political commentary.

The film program

Deconstruction of the Ancestor
by Yana Bachynska
Ukraine, 2016, 4 mins 48 min, no dialogue

“I’m trying to reach my roots to understand myself better, but what I face is the darkness of tradition and cruelty of past centuries. So I decided to invent an ancestor on my own. And I'll put him on like people put on their national costumes. It will be the best expression of my identity.” Y.B.

Yana Bachynska is a Ukrainian visual artist, curator, and film director whose practice focuses on queering grand narratives. He uses the method of induction, which means going from individual experience to reach the collective one, trying to achieve wholeness within contradictions. After obtaining a master’s degree in philosophy from Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University, he obtained a master’s degree from the Academy of Arts in Szczecin. During that time Yana was also a co-founder of the NGO Art Platform and a senior researcher at the Kyiv history museum.

Endless War
by Sergey Bratkov
Ukraine, 2007, 2 mins 28, no sound

“With this film I want to remind the audience with that every minute there is a war, death and people dying somewhere far away from home. Quite often there are stories about objects captured by an atmospheric vortex in one part of the world and sent to the other. Fallen helmets become such letters, reminders of war, that have accidentally come to us, to those who have not encountered it directly.” S.B

Sergey Bratkov is known for his unsparing, realistic portraits depicting post-Soviet life. His works have been described as critiquing Soviet ideology and capitalist mass media. Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Bratkov became associated with the radical Kharkiv School of Photography group in the late 1980s. As a photographer, he became a member of the artists’ collective Litera A in the 1980s, and subsequently of the Rapid Response Group, which is known for creating provocative photo campaigns, as a reaction to political and social atrocities. 

Vision of Life
by Diana Derii 
Ukraine, 2022, 7 mins 44 mins, sound from Maks Yos

Vision of Life is a video artwork that was filmed in May 2022 on the streets of Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. The city located on the West of Ukraine, is a conditionally safe place in the country in a state of war. The video was captured using thermal imagery during an air alarm and after a curfew, effectively altering the visual perspective. This shift in optics directs our attention towards the ordinary aspects of daily life within this newfound reality, where what was once considered the norm now constitutes the utopian.

Diana Derii is a multimedia artist who also curates independent art projects and engages in art documentation in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. She was born in 1998 in Chortkiv, Ternopil Region, Ukraine, and graduated from the Lviv Art Academy (2015 - 2019), where she obtained a Bachelor's degree in the restoration of artworks. During her studies, she practiced oil painting and performance art. In 2019, she studied at the School of Performance in Lviv, where she participated in a collective performance with Janusz Bałdyga's students during the Days of Performance. In 2020, she began her practice in the field of media art. In recent years, she has mainly worked with music events and festivals, becoming the visual resident of Detali Rave (the largest techno formation in Western Ukraine) starting in 2020. Diana made her debut as a curator at the multimedia group exhibition "Cnoty," featuring LGBT+ artists in a 63 Kettle Factory in Ivano-Frankivsk.

In 2020, she co-founded the creative space Halabuda 63 in the Kettle Welding Plant in Ivano-Frankivsk. The space housed studios for electronic musicians, an art studio, and an event hall for cultural events (music concerts and festivals, film festivals, theater performances, art exhibitions). At the beginning of the war, the space was closed as it was located on a strategic object. In 2021, she co-founded the NGO Asortymentna kimnata, creating a space and platform for the development of modern art in Ivano-Frankivsk. In 2022, she co-founded the NGO Detali, focusing on the development of the electronic music scene and extracurricular education in music and media arts.

Architectural Measurements
by Sergey Bratkov
Ukraine, 2018, 4 mins 09, with sound

”The short video you just watched was filmed four years ago. My brother Yura, an architect, reminisces about the destroyed buildings of a former children's sanatorium in the village of Led, a suburb of Kharkiv, where he lives. Today, my brother counts the explosions of bombs outside the window of his house. He hardly moves. He is ill. He is 75 years old.” S.B.

I’m sick and tired of you
by Yana Bachynska 
Ukraine, 2018, 5 mins 05, sound

Enormous eternal monuments weigh on my small mortal body. We are unequal, there is History that stands for them, and there is only everyday life that stands for me, and the dialogue between us is impossible. Still, I will try to talk to them.

The video was made in Szczecin, Poland. There was no specific selection of the monuments because it turned out that mostly they are the same – a realistic figure of a man that towers over the pedestrians. Most of the monuments represent political, military, or religious power. The monuments for poets were also made in the same canon of a proud man figure because even poetry may become a power for authorities.  

Remember the Smell of Mariupol
by Zoya Laktionova
Ukraine, 2022, 4 mins 17, sound

Director Zoya Laktionova talks about her 2 months of experience abroad in a state of two realities. Her documentary essay interacts with two landscapes in the same space of the video work. The work uses archival family photos of the artist and texts written in the first weeks of the war. The work absorbs one landscape into another, but it isn't easy to understand what kind of landscape this act carries out.

Zoya Laktionova was born in Mariupol in 1984. Zoya first appeared in the world of documentary cinema as a character in the film "Ma" in 2017, and a year later made her first short documentary "Diorama" about the mined sea at the Mariupol area. The film won an award in the MyStreetFilms category at the “86” festival (Ukraine) in 2018, has participated in numerous European film festivals and was released in cinemas in Ukraine in 2019. In 2021, Zoya premiered her new short "Territory of Empty Windows" at Docudays International Human Rights DFF, and showed it in cinemas at Molodist IFF in Kyiv, received a special award from the Ji.Hlava festival in 2021 and the main award at the documentary competition of the French-Ukrainian festival MIST 2021.

Before the start of a full-scale war of Russia against Ukraine (24/02/22), Zoya lived in Kyiv and worked as an independent artist and documentary filmmaker. She works with themes of war, memory and personal stories.

Dry Fire
by Olia Fedorova
Ukraine, 2021, 0:50 mins, performance video, sound

In archery “dry fire” means releasing a drawn bow without an arrow. This practice is dangerous, because the energy, instead of being absorbed by an arrow, is dissipated through the vibration of the bowstring and the bow limbs, which can lead to the significant structural damage to the bow and to the injury of an archer. 

Born in 1994 from Kharkiv, Ukraine. Temporary based in Graz, Austria. I work with meanings and connotations by studying the mechanics and the issues of their (trans)formation through performative intervention practices, observation, and writing. My work is focused on research and interaction with the environment being a semantic space. After 24.02.2022 when Russia launched a full-scale war against Ukraine, I had to re-focus my practice so that I could contribute to the informational and cultural resistance of my country. Writing in forms of (visual) poetry and journalism became my main art activity. I’ve been using words as a weapon, powered with the energy of love and rage, against modern Russian colonialism, imperialism and dictatorship, against oppression of all kinds, to make Ukrainian voices loud and heard. At the same time, I am searching for new means and approaches in my work with the environments: both those changed by the war forever and peaceful ones but always reminiscent about the war in my homeland. My aim is to create such an art about the war today, so that the next generations of Ukrainian artists won’t have to do it ever again.

Flags of Propaganda
by Maksym Khodak
Ukraine, 2018, 3 mins, sound

“Battleship Potemkin is one of the best-known films in history. However, in its essence, it was the propaganda of the Bolsheviks. The climax of the film, which confirms the previous thesis, is the raising of a red flag over the deck of the battleship. However, recording such a frame was difficult, due to the specifics of black and white cinema. That's why Sergei Eisenstein decided to shoot a white flag. For the premiere of, he painted each frame of the film with a flag in red. In my work, I repeat this gesture, colouring each frame with the flag, but with the only difference that instead of the Bolshevik flag, I use the colours of the flags of the most influential ideologies, the struggle of which is in the modern Ukrainian society.” M.K.

Maksym Khodak is an artist born and raised in Ukraine. He has studied Contemporary Arts at the Kyiv Academy of Media Arts. His work has been exhibited at the Kharkiv Municipal Gallery (2020), < rotor > Centre for Contemporary Arts (2020), Pasinger Fabrik (2019), Cultural space AkT (2018), and others. Maksym practice is built around the themes of memory, archives and also reacts to the current political situation around him.

Seacoast
by Mykola Ridnyi
Ukraine, 2008, 2 mins 11, sound

This video work was filmed on a coast of the Black Sea and shows a static horizon dotted with figures of fishermen. The calm surface of the image is periodically punctured by scenes of jellyfish splattering on the ground. The association with the sound of bombs dropping is achieved with recordings of frequencies produced by a jet plane. The video conveys the unsteadiness and relativity of calmness – how quickly and easily military aggression can escalate in the modern world. This work was made in response to the conflict between Georgia, Abkhazia and Russia that took place 6 years before the invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.

Mykola Ridnyi’s generation of Ukrainians grew up in a climate of increasing orientation toward the West and the European Union. This emancipation from Russia found expression in the 2004 Orange Revolution and was defended in the Euromaidan events of 2013–14. It was a process that went hand in hand with the emergence of a  Ukrainian arts scene, among whose leading exponents Ridnyi ranks. He was a founding member of the art collective SOSka, whose SOSka gallery-lab, an artist-run space that existed from 2005 until 2012. Ridnyi’s curatorial project Armed and Dangerous (2017–2021) prompted him to begin developing a platform for collaborations between Ukrainian moving-image artists and filmmakers. In 2022–23, he curated several Ukrainian film and video art screening programs at DAAD-Galerie, Berlin; MAXXI, Rome; Museum Folkwang, Essen; and the National Gallery, Sofia. In his most recent works, Ridnyi has turned his attention to fundamental questions concerning the role of media and the representation of war. 

Our third edition (2023/2024)

This third edition of our series is special, as we have chosen to dedicate it to the exploration of four distinct themes. We invite you to stay connected for forthcoming details about each program.

June (22 -29)  2023: Focus: Filmexplorer
October 26th - November 2nd 2023: Focus: Art of Intervention
December (7-14) 2023: Focus: Swiss Animation
February (8-15) 2024: Focus: Ukraine Video Art

On WF Online Series

The "WF Online Series" comprises four curated screening programs per year, each presenting a distinctive curatorial concept showcasing productions from Basel, Switzerland, and various corners of the world. Each program remains accessible for a duration of one week.

Our Funders

This project has been made possible thanks to the generous financial support provided by the Mary & Ewald E. Bertschmann-Stiftung and the Division of Cultural Affairs Basel-Stadt.