Modern Ukrainian Landscape
J U N E 29 - A U G E S T 07, 2022
Ya Gallery Center, Lviv, UA
Curator: Pavel Gudimov
“Can the calm of war be more terrifying than the dynamics of war? Sometimes there is a pause, everything goes silent, and a moment comes when you can realize what has happened in the last hours, days, weeks, and months. The coincidence of the static nature of the medium itself, photography, and the frozen, motionless state of reality, as if paused in the lens of Maxim Dondyuk, gives us the opportunity to see what photojournalists avoid, what you don't see in news reports or on the pages of newspapers: the terrible calm of this war. With every minute of contemplation, it reveals the other side - pain, tragedy, death, and devastation. It is a terrible word that is hard for us to accept, but it hangs over everything that war touches. It is devastation as a universal characteristic of everything around us.
Maxim is in Kharkiv, and I am in Lviv. We are talking on zoom. He tells me about the current shelling of the city, about the routine of death, about the reportage and the personal, the quiet and the extremely important for a photographer, about terrible fatigue and insomnia, and about his dream of spending at least a week in the Carpathians.
I propose an exhibition concept and a selection of photos. I immediately receive confirmation and emphasis on the complete coincidence of the approach. What genre is this? Do we recognize that these photographs draw us in with their cruelty and beauty at the same time? The first shots of this exhibition were taken in 2017. Sunrise, winter, silence. And through the winter, we move to the very fresh year of 2022.
We see the landscape of a new war, almost Flemish. The details speak. But a man appears in the frame blurred. He is the foreign body of this pause. These are landscapes and spaces that have one important accent: a vanished human history that was full of children's laughter, delicious dinners, endless conversations, singing, quarrels, and hugs. Now it is in the past. But... we can always believe that it will come back... The present will pass... However, life does not pause. Life is not like a photograph.”
Pavlo Gudimov, curator of the exhibition.