Konrad Dobrucki
Layers
Borodianka, Vinnytsia, Kyiv, Odessa, Lviv, and Ivano-Frankivsk: between March and July 2022, Konrad Dobrucki travels from one Ukrainian city shelled by Russian bombs to another, documenting monuments protectively covered with sandbags, plastic foil, fabrics, plywood, or sheet metal. Some carry drawings or descriptions that give an idea how they actually look like. Most, however, stand nameless.
How do covered-up monuments affect residents accustomed to their hitherto sight? How do they determine the city’s identity? How would we feel if the monuments of Polish kings, of Mickiewicz, Copernicus, or Piłsudski were shielded from view in our city?
With his black-and-white, minimalist analog photographs, Dobrucki creates a typology of abstract forms. Their location, shape, size, or a small fragment protruding here or there do not reveal what has been hidden or for what purpose they were installed. We could think that they are the result of restoration work, an artistic gesture, or a social experiment. However, this is not so. Their special meaning is determined by the context of the ongoing war. In its light, they become an expression of determination and protest against the ongoing invasion perpetrated by barbarians bombing housing estates, hospitals, schools, theatres, and central city squares. They are tokens of resistance against a regime that is making another attempt at re-colonization.
Monuments can be seen as an emanation of the nation’s symbolic field. People’s attitudes to them, the place and state they are in, their toppling and erecting – all this is evidence of a change in this field. The protection of monuments by the inhabitants of Ukrainian cities is therefore an expression of awareness of their own imaginary, of an attachment to it, and at the same time a gesture of opposition against attempts to destroy it. It is also an element of war, where this time it is the symbolic sphere that becomes the battlefield. It expresses opposition and resistance, but also communicates the message that military defeat would come at the price of the loss of subjectivity, national culture, and its symbols. This war has already been won by Ukraine.
- Exhibition curator
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Jan Brykczyński
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