Valentyn Odnoviun presents his photobook "SURVEILLANCE. A Typology of Oppression"
The book consists of photographs of the walking yard and prison cell door spyholes in former political prisons in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, Germany. The same places were used for similar purposes by different oppressive systems.
The actual work call into question the relation between what we see and what we perceive in advance of the act of recognition. These photographs emphasize the borders not only of human perception, but the border where the consequences of human action meet reason.
Valentyn Odnoviun’s photographs, at first glance very poetic, almost lunar, reveal a completely different truth: they are close-up views of prison cells’ peepholes. Most of them located in the Baltic States, Poland, Ukraine and Germany, have all served, at one time or another, as places of repression for the KGB and the Stasi in particular. For nearly two years, the Ukrainian photographer based in Lithuania visited these sites of memory to enrich a corpus composed to date of some forty images. By abandoning a documentary vocabulary for telling, on the contrary, History through photographs of a neat aestheticism, the artist triggers a visual experience for the spectator that is close to meditation. Silent, these images speak both of the isolation of incarceration and the metaphysical escape of men deprived of their freedom. These places of repression, under his lens which retains only the threshold between the outside and the inside, become planets with an impalpable surface, oscillating between transparency, translucency and opacity to express all the complexity of the Soviet bloc’s political surveillance in its darkest hours.
Lydia Dorner, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne.
The text was created for submission for Photolux Award 2019, Lucca, Italy.
The project "Surveillance" became a winner of the Photolux Award 2019.
Valentyn Odnoviun. SURVEILLANCE. A Typology of Oppression
Designer: Gulnara Galiachmetova, Valentyn Odnoviun
Color separation: Raimundas Austinskas
Production supervisor: Daniel Samulevič
Texts: Agnė Narušytė, Jan Gustav Fiedler
Proof reading: Patrick Murphy, Lynn Odnovyun
Publisher: Artprint.lt, Lithuanian Culture Research Institute
Printed by: Standartų spaustuvė
Year of edition: 2020
Book size: 24.5x20 cm
Edition: 450
Pages: 128
Price: book €35 (with print €55)
ISBN 978-609-95181-9-0
