Exodus From the Post-Soviet Condition
Film screenings and lecture

  • Exodus From the Post-Soviet Condition

We invite you to a series of film screenings and an accompanying presentation at the “Sunflower” Solidary Community Center. The event, curated and hosted by Olexii Kuchanskyi, will include screenings of movies by Oleksiy Radinskyi, fantastic little splash and Yuriy Hrytsyna.

 

At a time when the state apparatus and the market are trying to annex the discourse of decolonization and reduce it to a crypto-nationalist reversion of traditions (let's recall at least the conservative rhetoric of the Polish authorities and Putin's absurd justification of the "struggle with the collective West"), it is important to question the temporality of decolonization of post-socialism. What kind of future does it produce? How does this potential future condition the current state of affairs? And in general – how to think about decolonization beyond the patriarchal and militaristic oppositions of local-global, internal-external, ally-enemy, we-others, etc.?

The extremely mediatized war of Russia against the Ukrainian people, together with its military-strategic temporality, became the impetus for existentially charged and therefore urgent reflections on the future of the countries that were under the hegemony of the Soviet Union. What is the decolonization of post-socialism and should it be imaged? Or can the digital moving images, which direct the mediatized political and social processes of the former bloc countries, be thought of and felt as the proper medium – that is, literally, the milleu (latin “medium” means “in between”) – ​​of decolonization? What is the impact of collective affect and periods of common ecstasy on this process?

The series of events in the “Sunflower” Solidary Community Scenter opens with Olexii Kuchanskyi's presentation Exodus from the Post-Soviet Condition. A brief suggestion of decolonial perspective on contemporary art in Ukraine, which investigates the connection between ongoing forms of popular uprisings, the impact of the moving image on them, as well as the horizons of coming out of the global post-Soviet condition. Documentary shots of the ruins of public space, which arose as a result of the devastating neoliberalization of the city of Kyiv by Russian and Western capital, in Oleksiy Radinskyi's Circulation puts a spectator in both meditative and critical trance: the transition to advanced capitalism – where does it lead? concrete and unclear by fantastic little splash, sheds light on the history of images of one Soviet concrete formation – the huge unfinished building of Parus hotel in the Dnipro city, a node of the official Soviet colonial imagination, the search for a way out of it, and other collective social and political delusions. While found footage film Varta 1 by Yuriy Hrytsyna invites to observe the collective exaltation of activists of the Lviv Automaidan during the period of interregnum, when the criminal pro-Putin government was overthrown and the new one had not yet emerged. Once again: where are we ultimately headed?
 

Other events from that cycle: