A group show at Stills, Edinburgh uses photography to define or, because of Russia’s invasion, redefine notions of home
During August in Edinburgh, the various festivals, particularly the Fringe, ramp up the city’s already saturated tourist market. Amid the festive atmosphere, it’s easy to forget that, elsewhere, wars continue to devastate. Home: Ukrainian Photography, UK Words cuts to the heart of this. The work is hard: emotionally, beautifully, heartbreakingly hard. A group show, where photography is used to define or, because of Russia’s invasion, redefine notions of home.
One of the first images in the show is an emblem of this redefinition. Andrii Rachynskyi’s Hiding designations on a traffic sign (2022) shows a large multijunction road sign, the destinations blocked out in thick black paint, as if deleted by industrial-size Tippex. During the early stages of the invasion Russian forces only had paper maps, so local defence committees would travel Ukrainian intercity highways and obscure any identifiable street names or destinations on road signs, using the knowledge of their home landscape to disguise target locations.
Another series in the show is Elena Subach’s Chairs (2022), a collection of still lifes made when the artist was deployed with a catering regiment to the city of Uzhhorod, who organised to feed the refugees waiting to cross the border into Slovakia. These photographs of chairs piled with the abandoned belongings of escaping refugees are a document of what is left when the core of a home is ruptured. In one image, two blankets have been hastily folded on top of each other, one red and one pink; a bodily heap like a parent with a wriggly child on their knee. In another, some mismatched dinnerware, relics of domestic life now exposed and vulnerable in the open air.
Alexander Chekmenev’s Passport (1995) is one of the only works here made pre-invasion. Chekmenev was commissioned by the Ukrainian government to make passport photos for those who were ill or elderly or unable to pay for the service, so he travelled to his subjects’ homes. With Ukraine no longer under Soviet rule – when making such documents of domestic life was forbidden – Chekmenev widened the frame to show the grim conditions under which people were living. In one image a woman sits regally, hands poised, wearing a dress that blooms with the colours of summer, the passport photo background, a sheet of white cloth, held up behind her by a faceless friend. Outside this ad hoc frame is the woman’s day-to-day: a single bed, a wash basin alongside, clothes and bags overflowing. Her life here is stark, in contrast to the presumed outcome of the commissioned governmental snapshot.
What often goes unrecognised is that artists, too, are members of communities, and that when a community is displaced an artist’s practice loses its centre. In these images the artist’s work is forced to become a home for the artist, the only familiar place available to return to. In times of war, the usual mechanisms by which art is shared and circulated become more fragile. But at Stills the works endure, giving those of us who now live in peace some understanding of the violent fractures of life experienced by others.
Home: Ukrainian Photography, UK Words at Stills, Edinburgh, 2 August – 5 October
