Bad Blood (Дурна кров)  

By Maya Kolesnik 

11th – 21th July 

Exhibition Opening 11th July 17:00-19.00 

Myymälä2 is pleased to present “Bad Blood” (Дурна кров) by the artist Maya Kolesnik, the exhibition marks her first solo show in Finland.  With her photographs, Kolesnik invites us to think how utopian architecture and the concept of built spaces can relate to human existence, and its representation and visualisation in the exhibition space depict both in-between imagined places and precarious states of mind. Her Inspiration and motives are strongly rooted in Odesa, now shattered by the war, Kolesnik is born and bred there. She continuously engages in remembrance of the happy days in Odesa. “Odesa is both celebration and lament and equally impressive as both.” wrote Harold Bloom, in that sense, Kolesnik’s compelling remembrances of her life in the city are a sorrowful evocation of Odesa like her paradise lost. 

In Kolesnik’s premise, working with memories and visual fragments of the past is akin to creating a personalised mosaic, representing a variation of a viewpoint within the collective consciousness. She imagines the chain of events as a film reel, addressing the current state of affairs and continuing to explore the complex relationships between visual images and socio-informational narratives. Kolesnik incites us to look closely at spaces presented. Somehow, in them the past carries the key to new possibilities for altering the present, offering an opportunity to interpret objects and texts and their meanings with contemporary relevance. Engaging with archival materials enables Kolesnik to work with structures related to self-identification, a matter that became particularly acute for southern Ukraine in 2014.

One can say that Kolesnik draws a visual hypothesis, in which the documentation of missile strikes, which obliterate the structures and attributes of a long-vanished regime, highlights the final disintegration of the post-Soviet era. A specific representation of the world in the information space simultaneously reveals and conceals reality. The exhibition showcases a multilayered structure in retrospect — reflecting internal and external worlds, sensations, and samples of reality placed in sterile conditions, as well as fictional, collective, and personal memories and traumas.

Maya Kolesnik – (b. 1986) Ukrainian artist born in Odesa, Ukraine. She has graduated from Odesa State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture in 2009 with a Master’s degree in Architecture and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon with Master in Art in 2017. Participant of the exhibition of 20 nominees of the Pinchuk Art Prize in 2009. The artist’s works are kept in private collections worldwide and in the collection of Odesa National Fine Arts Museum. Lives and works in Odesa.

Maya Kolesnik is an Artist at Risk (AR) Safe Haven Helsinki Resident, organised and curated by Perpetuum Mobile – PM ry (PM).  

https://artistsatrisk.org/