Victor Sydorenko

05.02.2016

- Let’s start our conversation with maybe a cliché, but still an interesting question: how do you manage to combine active creative work of an artist with the post of director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, and in addition being an art critic?

- The main thing for me is being an artist of course. I don’t want my director post to be viewed as bureaucratic. For me, the Institute has become yet another project that I was able to implement and extend. The Institute was founded fifteen years ago (so this year we have an anniversary); today it employs serious professionals, PhD’s, prominent critics; every year we publish their monographs and collections of articles; our publishing activities are the envy of any scientific institution in Ukraine. I believe that we are doing the right thing combining theory with practice, and our exhibitions are a kind of laboratory where members of the Institute have the opportunity to visualize their ideas and to work directly with contemporary art. The Institute conducts a wide variety of exhibitions, we are open to everyone. I always say, bring us good projects, we are ready to discuss and support.

It is a pleasure and an honor to work in this team, one needs only to help. And as for my texts — they give me so much personally, because I think it is important to any artist to clearly understand what he is doing, to be able to formulate it, and then his thoughts would be interesting to others. By the way, my book "Visual Art from the Avant-garde Shifts to New Directions: Development of Ukrainian Visual Art in the XX-XXI Centuries" enjoys public interest, moreover I even received an offer to re-release it! I was taught to record my thoughts and ideas by Boris Kosarev, my teacher at the Kharkiv Art and Industry Institute.

- It is great to learn from such an outstanding artist. Tell us more about it.

- I studied at the faculty of design and interiors of exhibitions and advertising. Now I understand how it turned out to be useful: we were taught to work with space, with different materials and eventually with what today is called "an art project" - arrangement of theme in space. Boris talked about his legendary colleagues: Yermilov, Sinyakov sisters, David Burliuk, Khlebnikov… It was very interesting to learn from him, he always offered new and unexpected tasks that forced us to see the unusual in usual. For example, to find a hundred shades of white in different materials. In his interpretation the intarsia technique turned into study of the texture of wood, lines patterns, colors relationships. When we were painting a portrait, Kosarev spoke about the history of drawing, its features and diversity. He had interested us in photography. And he also told us how important it is to write down your thoughts and ideas, for example concerning the future composition of the painting: details, color, characters. Perhaps this can be compared with the principles of conceptualism, where it is important to invent and to name, but particular shape comes later. After these lessons you could work in theater, in film, in design, in graphic arts.

- And how did you use these skills?

- I tried to work in film. In 1982 I was invited by Dovzhenko film studio to be an artist at "Anatomy of a Miracle" film directed by Ivanov. The work was very interesting, but I realized that it is a thankless job. In the movie, no matter how interesting your project, sketches, drafts were, it all dissolves in the collective creation of a film. And besides, back then Sergey Grigoriev was teaching me in the workshops of the Academy of Arts, where creative tasks were related to painting. But film experience was not in vain, it was useful for my own projects.

- You are working in various media today — creating compositions on canvas, making sculptures, shooting video, animation. What is the most interesting?

- Computer, video and photography are not only separate arts, but also creativity tools of contemporary artist. Even when you make a painting, it is difficult to do without camera and computer. But lately I am less and less concerned with technical, performing part of the process. I'm more worried today about my "character", his semantic content. I generally stick to the principle: if you can take pictures or shoot video, there is no need to paint. Picasso thought that with the emergence of photography, artists understood what they don’t need to do. Now I work mostly with objects, and while formally they certainly look like sculpture, they are created in completely different way. Also I do painting, though it too can not be called painting in the classical sense. This gives me the opportunity to develop some symbolic anthropology through my characters in different "dimensions" — in space, on plane, on canvas. As for the video, I love complex productions, but they are quite expensive.

- As is known, a landmark for your creative work is a project "Millstones of Time" shown at the Venice Biennale in 2003. It was multimedia and included painting, photo, video and lighting effects. Its content made it possible for a wide range of interpretations: from Chernobyl problems to posttraumatic emotions of Soviet experiences. You associate it in your texts with "overcoming of time".

- Yes, first of all I wanted to show the cruelty and the inevitability of time, and human destiny woven into it. This topic is relevant for everyone, but for our country, which constantly dwells on some social, political and even psychological fracture, it is very important. Personal tragic story of my family touches the project: my grandfather was a miller, and after returning from war he fell into the millstones and died. Maybe that's why the project turned out to have hidden emotion and touched viewers, forced them not only to watch and think but to experience something.

- The main character of your work, "a man in his underpants," "one of many", "mass man" appeared in "Amnesia" project in 1996. Most often you gave him your own features. Why?

- I'm very close to this subject — the human as a special and unique person, and the human as part of a social body. A large part of my life was spent during Soviet era, I have experience of childhood in the village in Tien Shan where exiled and displaced people and army personnel lived. When perestroika came, it all crumbled, and it was necessary to re-search for your place in the world, in arts, in time. It was not easy for me, and for many others, and for the whole country.

- But even today, this topic does not lose its relevance. In Ukraine people are talking about the necessity of de-Sovietization, overcoming Sovietness. But essentially no one works with this subject except you.

- When my "Amnesia" project appeared in the 1990s, it had not attracted attention immediately. But now, when most of the works went to museums and private collections, it is of interest to many. Why is this happening? Hard to say. Sometimes the art is ahead of society, sometimes society compels one to look at the art in a different way.

- I was very impressed with your project "Reflection in the Unknown", held in 2013 in Yermilov Center in Kharkiv. It was very solid and at the same time it had internal dynamics, exactly inscribed in the multilevel exhibition space. You showed sculptures, drawings, videos, pictures, which depict not only male but also female figures. United through the idea of "creation of the new man", these works continue and expand your main theme. In fact, we are talking about the analysis of one of the utopias, person design by a certain externally conceived plan, that is, from the medieval Golem, through the "new man" of avant-garde to human models of totalitarian regimes. Are you going to continue to develop this "artistic research"?

- Maybe. Although the topic of the "Sovietness", or rather of overcoming it, one way or another has gone through most of my projects. It is interesting that it can be read even without the presence of external attributes. Just a red background is enough for the work to acquire a quite definite meaning. This happened during my exhibition "Levitation" in Miami in 2012. It was immediately read through the prism of revolution and "left" movement. There are very strong symbolic moments in art that are difficult to recode.

- Your project "Metanoia", "Witnesses" shown in Lviv in 2015 consists essentially of standardized, impersonal portraits of injured suffering people. Although stylistically it was in many ways close to "Millstones of Time", in the current dramatic situation endured by our country, these images have acquired a quite specific meaning. So this theme is not yet exhausted for you?

- Probably not. Though of course I would like to detach my characters from the associations with the Soviet past. For me, these half-naked figures in some kind of nominal space are people in general, "a man in time". I change their external features, they are now painted not only from me, but from young people, who also have to search themselves in the obscure present and an unknown future. It seems to me that my works are becoming more complicated both formally and figuratively, new processes are taking place in them. To me it is important and interesting.

Interview by Galina Sklyarenko