Culture of Confrontation
S E P T E M B E R - O C T O B E R 2019
Municipal Gallery, Ehingen, DE
Curator: Anne Linder, Volker Sonntag
Introduction speech to exhibition
by Volker Sonntag
In winter 2013/2014 the Independence Square in Kyiv - the Ukrainian word for place is "maidan" - became a focal point of world events.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 states such as Ukraine were in one political tug-of-war between Russia and the EU. The economic situation of the general population had worsened. The state was weakened, a network of oligarchs and old party networks had taken control over public property and the media. They used the political parties for their purposes, unemployment increased and corruption flourished. In November 2013, demonstrations began on the Maidan against these conditions. The reason was that President Yanukovych had obeyed pressure from Moscow not to sign an association agreement with the EU. The protesters behaved peacefully, concerts took place, often there was a veritable festival atmosphere. Maxim Dondyuk, who lived in Kyiv, was there from the beginning.
Then the situation escalated. On the night of December 1st, the demonstrators were dispersed by a special police unit with brutal force. Increasingly, the situation got out of control, public buildings were occupied by protesters and barricades built. On 18 February 2014 the Militia shot with live ammunition. In the end there were over 120 dead and countless wounded. On 21 February the conflict ended with an internationally signed contract, Russian friendly President Yanukovych fled to Moscow.
Hot spots such as Euromaidan, as it is called today, attract hundreds of media people, always in search of the spectacular picture but without the time to deal with the backgrounds. A cameraman working for an American news channel told that within two weeks he had worked in five countries on three continents. In our media society information has become a highly profitable commodity that no longer is being measured by the criteria of truth and lie but by their attractiveness - they have to sell well by satisfying the sensation-seeking public.
Dondyuk noted that about 200 photographers were on the field, barely one spoke the language or understood the history of his country. Their inner distance was visible for everyone because mostly their cameras were equipped with long telephoto lenses by which you can zoom near what happens far away without being close.
In contrast to their working routine Dondyuk's reportages are characterized by empathy and compassion. He is interested in people. For three months he lived with the demonstrators on the Maidan. Instead of using a telephoto lens he works consistently with a 35mm wide-angle lens so that for a close-up he must get close to the people he is photographing. This gives his pictures their strong emotional intensity that we deeply feel.
He is not even a meter away of the three praying women or the three soldiers in this room whom a protester is offering flowers. Each face of the three women touches us with an individual expression of grief, sorrow, and pleading to God. Here Dondyuk has created an iconic picture of pain, such as Matthias Grünewald in the Isenheim Altarpiece brought to timeless expression with the three mourning figures at the foot of the crucifixion.
At the same time, Dondyuk combines such closeness with respect. In the last room of our exhibition he does not aim the camera at the faces or injuries of the wounded and dead but on the priest, the paramedics and the relatives. Their feelings affect us emotionally much more than a voyeuristic portrayal of the horror.
Such proximity to the motif creates an emotional impact that can be experienced best in the large formats in our exhibition. The four heavily armed, muzzled militiamen in the next room who roll away an oil barrel are moving straight towards the photographer, their eyes meet him and thus us. Dondyuk paid his tribute for such proximity with two injuries by rubber bullets.
"This revolution has changed not only myself but also my photography and visual language,” he says. "Of course I was on the side of protesters but it was also important for me to know what on the other side of the barricades was going on. I did not want to show the good guys and the bad guys but the confrontation of two different philosophies of the world - "the culture of confrontation".
This is how Dondyuk's artistic intentions have changed in the course of this project. He was no longer concerned with documenting the actual event, instead he wanted to work out its universal human character, as Shakespeare did in his historical dramas like Macbeth, King Lear or Richard II.
Therefore his relation to the event has changed. He goes on distance and shows a panorama from a high perspective. One can look at these scenes as human moodscapes, like paintings of Bruegel in which due to the wide depth of focus of the wide-angle-objective we can observe unbelievably many details. These pictures are no longer made for the small-format magazines but for large formats, as in our exhibition.
Now the aesthetic design becomes very important. Dondyuk photographs digitally and edits files on the computer specifically for their aesthetic effect.
A central design element becomes the Light. The external circumstances are already spectacular. Fire and smoke of burning barricades, foggy steam from water cannons, reflections on the wet ground and the low winter sun, which intensifies shadows, contrasts and plasticity create highly dramatic moods like Baroque paintings from Turner, Caravaggio or Hollywood fantasy movies. The human drama becomes a drama of light.
The artist also makes the Light shine as a spiritual power as in paintings by Rembrandt. Have a look at the light of the candles the three women are holding in their hands and see how it is being repeated in the dome of the Michaelskirche during the funeral, but also on the tops of the tents.
The protesters built barricades with burning car tires and buses. Fire has always been a symbol of revolution. In the next room emerges a black shadow figure who bears a striking resemblance to the allegory of freedom in Delacroix's revolutionary painting "Freedom Leads the People". But in another picture, a single man stares shocked in a fiery inferno of burning buses. Such scenes are reminiscent of gothic paintings by Bruegel or Hieronymus Bosch of the Last Judgment where volcanoes break out of the earth and burn down houses, mountains, and seas to mark the end of humanity.
At the same time fire also visualises what happens inside the people. They are transformed from a self-determined individual into an element of a mass. In his great study "Mass and Power" Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti analyses the fire as a mass symbol. I quote: "Mass symbols express the essential properties of the mass. The fire is sudden, everywhere, it is contagious and insatiable. The mass also forms and inflames suddenly by an external event, few can resist its contagion, they want to keep going and are hardly controllable anymore. The crowd feels attracted from fire and hurries to the scene of the fire, in front of which the individuals feel connected and close to all the others." This rapturous, almost ritualistic mood of the mass in front of a big fire Dondyuk recorded in a picture in the next room.
The antithesis of fire is the coldness of the ice, which means the death of all life, stagnation, and endpoint. Because of the winter and the water cannons, ice was everywhere on the Maidan in impressive formations. In C.D.Friedrich's painting “the lost hope” the ship stranded in the Arctic Ocean can be seen as a symbol of the lost hope for democratic freedom in the era of political restoration after Napoleon's defeat. In Dondyuk’s Maidan pictures ice could also be interpreted as a metaphor of the political and social situation in Ukraine which the protesters try to melt by their fire.
It is no coincidence that "Songs of Ice and Fire" is the title of the original book for the most successful American television series "Game of Thrones", which settles in a fictitious medieval world and thematizes the eternal struggle for power and Good and Evil. It has been always the same pictures that accompany our human history: the burning of Troy, of Jerusalem, the old Rome, Constantinople, the world wars, the pictures from Iraq, Syria. This timeless ubiquity of violence we also experience in Dondyuk's photographs. With their helmets, big shields and rubber truncheons the militia could be moved from the Maidan directly into the Middle Ages and the demonstrators with their wooden beating sticks and construction helmets could be directly related to the peasant wars.
The militiamen with their big shields form human walls as we know from Roman and medieval battle orders. These scenes convey what Canetti has analyzed as the essence of the mass: The police have lost their self-responsibility and individuality and are just a number written on their helmets. Their identity has been reduced to enforcers of an outside command. But the demonstrators have lost their individuality and self-control, too. They became part of the angry flames of destructive fire which they inflame as black shadow ghosts with Molotov cocktails and burning car tires.
With the pictures of this exhibition, Dondyuk has dissolved the border between documentation and art. Documentation has to be truthful and objective: This event happened exactly as the photographer has photographed it. But what is a reality? For Dondyuk reality became translucent on the Maidan. He says, "I suddenly saw no revolution on Independence Square anymore, in front of me opened Battle scenes from legends and fairytales. Euromaidan became one of the visually most beautiful revolutions, like scenes in a Hollywood movie. The border between reality and fiction disappeared for me.” This personal subjective experience has guided him in his recordings.
So did he distort reality? Did he play down the terrible by its aestheticization? What difference does it make for us viewers whether the terrible is real or fiction and carefully staged by a painter or film director? Is there beauty in the terrible - volcanic eruptions, thunderstorms, forest fires, the planes in the World Trade Center in NY? - that fascinates us deeply? These are questions that have to be discussed in detail and controversially why we cannot deal with it here and now.
But what we can say is that Dondyuk´s photographs have gained new and complex dimensions through his devotion to art. What is it that makes a good work of art? Art arises from a touching experience that is aesthetically so designed that through the artwork also the viewers are being touched. It must be designed so that it provides us with many references and associations which we can connect with our personal and cultural experiences and those from the collective unconscious.
I want to conclude with my thoughts about two pictures in this room which touch me very much: The first is about the motif of the candle as a symbol of life and hope as you can see it in the image of the three praying women in this room. This motif is being resumed in the next room. There it is a young protester holding a Molotov cocktail, a devoted expression on his face, like a sacral candle in his hands that another man just ignites. This young man is outshone by a bright, aura-like light, as we know it from paintings by Rembrandt. There are so many ambiguous meanings in this picture that one could write a short story about it.
The young cellist of the Dakh Daughters Band is on her way to play a concert on the Maidan. With her face painted white, her huge eyes, the long headscarf and the fur coat she appears as a being from another world, reminiscent of angelic representations in medieval paintings. The cello box on her back makes one think of wings, but also of a person she carries. She moves towards a doorway in the boarded-off space, into one other world, looking in our direction. Iconographically it is the motif of a guardian angel, a shaman, a spiritual leader like she appears in the guise of Beatrice in Dante's “Divine Comedy” who leads him through the nine celestial spheres. For me, she has protected Dondyuk on his way on the Maidan.