2019 - 2020

Installation
Material: paper / blind printing, nails

Created as part of the project “Imprint. Ukrainian printed graphics of the 20th – 19th centuries” 10.06-16.08.2020 at the Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv.
Curator: Kateryna Pidhayna


"The project has become the result of studying the boundary between the sacred / norm / stability and the human / shaky / variable. The opposite of Sacrum / Profanum is universal, because it allows to compare oppositional territories in all planes of human existence. Being in different historical and social contexts, man is within the norms and dogmas of his time - that is the concept of Sacrum. The sacred covers all spheres of life and is manifested at different levels and categories. The territory of the profane is unpredictable, conditional, full of substituted concepts and sarcasm.

Sacrum and Profanum are not completely mutually exclusive, but a much more complex relationship. Our collective memory lacks a common denominator to make a clear distinction between these planes. And against the background of desacralization, which our society has gone through, this border looks even more distorted.

The installation reflects the change of the Sacrum / Profanum planes. Here are used objects of religious worship or cult of the era, depreciated attributes of the sacred, which fell to the plane of the purely material. Invisible processes of disappearance and transformation in the material world are recorded on paper, which is evidence of large-scale mental changes. Each print is a note of my research, evidence of the lost presence of the artifact, its transition to a new plane. Paper, as a carrier of information, is a document that, despite its fragility, can give meaning. It preserves the baggage of intellectual and cultural heritage. We testify to our birth, baptism and death on paper."


The 8 x 8 m installation Sacrum/Profanum is shaped like a classical iconostasis, reproducing its structure in detail. Over the course of a year, paper prints were made for the project from surfaces in destroyed temples, objects of religious paraphernalia that had lost their function. Also, a significant part of the work consists of symbolic elements of everyday life, objects of desire, or those that outlined the current system of values.


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