Remembering the old world

In “Remembering the Old World,” the project focuses on the emotional needs of a person in times of acute technological and social change. The emphasis is on feelings of fear and anxiety, the search for compensating pleasure, and the transcendence of reality into the interdimensional past and future, both real and imagined.

A series of objects was created that were born and exist in a vortex of emotions and memories, as if to lull and adjust to the new “today.” This series of objects and videos was inspired by the beach environment. It has lost its clearly defined features, though: is it a beach in Odessa where the artist grew up before moving to the Czech Republic? Or is it just a mirage, a fata-morgana ‘young girl’ personifying the model citizen of a commodified society, an identity colonized by dreams of the best?

A collective dream of “normality” lives in Odessa, among fancy advertising and expressive architecture. People of different builds and ages lie on the beaches here, gazing at the West. Ukraine with its young capitalism is a kind of collective metaphor for the “young girl”—a naive society trying to adopt Western attributes.

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*Tiqqun, Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, first published in France in 1999