The first Polish solo exhibition by Ukrainian 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

Valentyn Odnoviun was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in 1987 and has lived and worked in Vilnius for a decade. He is a member of the Association of Lithuanian Art Photographers. Graduated from the Faculties of Photography and Media Arts (2016) and Theory and History of Arts (2019) at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. He also studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź in 2015 and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich under the Erasmus Programme. He is currently working on his PhD dissertation at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute. Valentyn Odnoviun has won scholarships, residencies and prizes at international festivals, including New Zealand, the USA and many European countries. He examines photography’s potential as an unlimited medium that opens the viewer to multidirectional interpretation. At the same time, his work is a voice of a generation that has to deal with the difficult communist heritage of Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland. Valentyn Odnoviun reminds us of the existence of totalitarian regimes in the context of contemporary threats and social divisions.

Curator: Małgorzata Taraszkiewicz-Zwolicka