#realityadaptation

This project is a holistic study of urban spaces, consisting of a growing a series of illustrations that depict the artist’s vision of cities—with a focus on everyday locations that catch your attention when you first arrive in the city and become invisible when you walk by them every day.

Work on the series began in 2018. This was preceded by acquaintance with the “Garage Gang” public organization, which came to Bakhmut in 2016 to investigate urban mythologemes for the “City Code” project. In 2018 “Garage Gang” and Goethe-Institut implemented “Remote and Imminent: Culture and Conflict,” a cultural project in Kostiantynivka, where Rostyslav Sosnovyi and the artist became one of five teams to write and implement a signature project. That was when the work on #realityadaptation started. Following the example of “Garage Gang,” the original idea was to compare small cities, administrative centres and regional centres, by investigating the history of the cities and building their mythologemes. However, it was not possible to visit all the desired places, and thus the project had to be reinvented.

The work of #realityadaptation has gone far beyond the one project and has accumulated over 1,500 images. It is more of a creative method and style of life, where cities are observed in a moment, exploring them through the artist’s own presence and experience.

The presented exhibit broadcasts the artist’s altered perception of Ukraine. It contains 53 illustrations from 25 cities: Bakhmut, Vinnytsia, Dnipro, Dobropillia, Zhytomyr, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kramatorsk, Kropyvnytskyi, Lyman, Lysychansk, Lutsk, Lviv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Poltava, Rubizhne, Sievierodonetsk, Sloviansk, Sumy, Ternopil, Uzhghorod, Kharkiv, Kherson, Chernihiv, and Chernivtsi. If one looks at the series as a whole, one can see the peculiar similarity of the images because, in a sense, the voyages themselves united these different cities.