Valentyn Odnoviun. Echoes of the Unseen

2023 10 24

Valentyn Odnoviun Echoes of the Unseen

08.09.23-28.01.24

NOMUS. New Museum of Art. Branch of National Museum in Gdansk www.nomus.gda.pl

The first Polish solo exhibition by Ukrainian- Lithuanian artist Valentyn Odnoviun will present photographic series on places of forced seclusion. Taken over eight years, chiefly in Lithuania, Ukraine, Latvia, Poland and Germany, the pictures result from the artist’s interest in contextual photography and the post-Soviet world. The artist searches for places of totalitarian violence and analyses their appearance to photograph them in unconventional ways. These pictures are part of a described but unseen history of the Second World War and communism in Eastern Europe. They are archives of the traces of people who were cut off, imprisoned and exterminated. With their formal devices, Odnoviun’s photographs take on an ambiguity. Prison cell eyeholes, overexposed sheets of photographic paper or building wall surfaces create surprising visual qualities, closer to abstraction than figurative recording. Odnoviun also refers to Polish subjects in his work and one of his series, PW44, is dedicated to the Warsaw Uprising. Another one, Horizons, has a piece made in a former Gestapo, then Polish communist secret police (UB) prison in Gdańsk. The artist focuses on the historical continuity of the purpose of the same places. By creating archives of evidence, as it were, he muses about history, human nature and the continually recurring threat to human freedom.

Małgorzata Taraszkiewicz-Zwolicka

Curator: Małgorzata Taraszkiewicz-Zwolicka

Honorary patronage:

Embassy of Lithuania in Warsaw

Consulate of Ukraine in Gdansk

Partnerzy/ Partners

Lithuanian Culture Institute

Media Patronage