Almost every Ukrainian city, town or village has mosaic, relief or stained-glass panels created by artists in 1960s–1980s. Envisioned as decorations for public spaces, these art works were hardly ever really seen as residents never recognized their artistic merit. It was treated as state-commissioned propaganda, not worthy of attention. A reason for the paradox is that the USSR did not develop public space as such, lacking the basic freedoms to buttress it: freedom of assembly, protest and self-expression. For this ongoing series I’ve been visiting all regions in Ukraine since 2013 to photograph local monumental art pieces and establish their history. I want to present them clean of the intrusive visual noise of post-Soviet cities that never quite got over their gung-ho capitalism. My desire to defamiliarize the Soviet heritage had developed into 7 years of work. I visited more than 500 cities and villages, covering more than 60,000 km of Ukrainian roads, discovered around 5,000 monumental art pieces.
Dnipro, Dnipro-Lotsmanska Railway Station, 2015
Shepetivka, Mykola Ostrovsky Regional Literary Memorial Museum, 2016
Kyiv, Palats Ukraina Subway Station
Mariupol, Railway Station
Dnipro, Meteor Ice Sports Palace
Crimea, Bus Stop Rezervne
Kyiv, Shuliavska Subway Station
Yuzhnoukrainsk, Yuzhnoukrainska Nuclear Power Plant
Kalanchak, House of Culture
Kyiv, Institute for Nuclear Research of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine