There is no such a thing
An event does not exist until it is visually fixed. Historical photography often determines how the event will be interpreted.
Memory is infinitely fragile, and its primacy can be destroyed by ideologies and censorship in a single click. Now that anyone can put any image in the public space of social media, stories can be taken over. Aware of this, power structures have created algorithms that decide which images are suitable for viewing and which are best hidden/deleted. Such visual dictatorship is a convenient tool for manipulating historical memory.
This installation is an attempt to capture stories dissolved under the pressure of censorship. The work interacts with the archive without appealing to specific historical events: it displays screenshots of archived photos that were hidden by a social media algorithm as content potentially containing violent scenes. It does not matter which event it is, because conflicts of memory are timeless, and the neglect of one injury inevitably leads to the neglect of others. At the same time, the abstract nature of the documentation makes it possible to speak of violence without multiplying it.
Veronika Shuster
Veronika was born in 1999 in Kharkiv. She lives and works in Kharkiv and Tel Aviv (Israel) as an artist and performer. She works with themes of memory and participation in documentary and post-documentary mediums.
