#148: Mykola Ridnyi

Mykola Ridnyi’s activity balances between being an artist and filmmaker, curator and educator. He works across media ranging from early collective actions within the SOSka group to the amalgam of individual site-specific installations and sculptures. Nevertheless, moving image and photography cycles constitute the current focus of his practice. In recent films, he experiments with nonlinear montage, collage of documentary and fiction. Unpredictable connections and references characterize not only the visual style but a conceptual method of his work where little known historical events can be told through actions of modern youth and elements of international pop culture. His way of reflecting social and political reality draws on the contrast between fragility and resilience of individual stories and collective histories.

A number of Ridnyi’s films and photography cycles are related to his hometown of Kharkiv. The role of the second largest city of Ukraine dramatically changed because of the Russian war of aggression: from a scientific, cultural and logistical center to a defensive frontier. The body of work created over the past decade is a mix of stories, places and actions, shaping the narrative of people, city and country, and underlines the significance of historical context. His work addresses the question of how to talk about violence and war but not multiply its brutality in the visual language.

Mykola Ridnyi, who is present, will show:

The Battle over Mazepa, 2023, 26 min
The Battle Over Mazepa conceptualises the historical significance and contemporary perception of Ivan Mazepa, a political and military leader of the Zaporizhian Sich and Left-bank Ukraine in the late-17th and early-18th century. Addressing codes of hip-hop culture, Ridnyi borrows the popular form of a rap battle to collide two great works of world literature associated with this historical figure: Mazeppa by Lord Byron in 1819 and Poltava by Alexander Pushkin in 1828–29. While Byron envisions Mazepa as a romantic hero, seized by love, Pushkin portrays him as a traitor in accordance with the colonial attitude of the Russian Empire. Highlighting the confrontation of these two texts, Ridnyi invited four rappers from different national and cultural backgrounds to write and perform their response to the poets’ lyrics.

No Regrets, 2011 / 2016, 6 min
No Regrets is based on footage of the suspension performance filmed in a night club. Suspension is a subculture distinguished by the act of suspending a human body from hooks that have been put through body piercings. Many participants are Ukrainian representatives of teenage communities fascinated by heavy music, tattoos and piercing. Youth radicalism is sublimed here in bodily experience and overcoming pain thresholds, practiced as a protest against the routines of everyday life and social normatives. Opposite to political activism, in this case literally shows a desire to fly away from social relationships – a breakup which is possible only through physical pain. Five years after these filmed events, Ukraine was engaged in a war that provoked a fatal challenge for youth. Apart from obligatory military service, many young people joined volunteer battalions engaged in political extremes. Pain changed its role from a symbol of escape from social normatives to a symbol of a new normality in the context of war.

NO! NO! NO!, 2017, 22 min
Reaching their early twenties in Kharkiv, young people coincided with the breakout of the war in the neighboring region of Donbas. An LGBT activist and poet, a fashion model, a group of street artists, a creator of a computer game – all of them are artists or working in the creative industries, typical for a peaceful life of a big city. However, the proximity to the war affects each of the characters and their activities. Heroes react and reflect political events through their specific relationships with the urban space and the reality of social media.

The District, 2023, 20 min
In 2022, a neighborhood of Northern Saltivka in Kharkiv has become the containment boundary for the Russian invasion and has suffered significant destruction. A walk through the “ghost district” forging ahead of coexistence of past and present, outward and inward landscapes, facts and recollections. Voiceover recites the artist’s memories of places of his childhood and youth that no longer exist.

Mykola Ridnyi (b. 1985) graduated from Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts. Now he is living and working in Berlin, where he holds a guest professorship in the Lensbased class at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). His works have been exhibited internationally, including at Schinkel Pavillon, Transmediale, and DAAD Gallery in Berlin; Albertinum in Dresden; GFZK in Leipzig, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm; the Kyiv biennale, e-flux screening room in New York and Los Angeles Filmforum among the others. He participated in the national pavilion of Ukraine at the Venice biennial twice (2013, 2015) as well as in the main program All the World’s Futures of the 56-th Venice Biennale.