Dreams of a History of a Humankind

In the photo installation, the dreams of a history of humanity are being put on record. In a physical and imaginative form, it documents those longings, fears, and visions, which hitherto have not been registered in an official archive. The works on display analyze different forms of historiography by centering a single motif: Tetiana Yablonska’s Khlib [Eng.: ‘Bread/Grain’]. The relevance of this massively influential, ideologically charged socialist-realist painting remains undiminished in Ukraine even amid the ongoing politics of decommunization.

The starting point of the work was a critical analysis of the painting and its history. The research included several trips to Ukraine—among these to Kyiv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Letava, the village where Yablonska created her painting from which the works shown emerged. 'Khlib' is omnipresent, caught in a loop of continuous repetitions, revealing the fractured and ambivalent presence of a Soviet past. Registered herein are its countless reproductions and traces as well as its seemingly traceless manifestations: private and collective dreams, textbooks, theatrical re-enactments, public records, and forgotten museum collections, which inspired the title of the work. 

The assembled photographic material has been organized into a new spatial formation and restaged based on a photograph taken in an office in the National Art Museum of Ukraine.