She Asked, I Followed. Her Name Is After

Fredric Snitzer Gallery and Voloshyn Gallery are proud to present a group show featuring Ukrainian artists such as Nikita Kadan, Pavlo Kerestey, Lesia Khomenko, Dana Kavelina, Oleksiy Sai, Mykola Ridnyi, Maria Sulymenko, Yevgen Samborsky, Vlada Ralko, Daniil Revkovskiy and Andriy Rachinskiy, Danylo Halkin, and Yaroslav Futymskyi.

The show includes recent works documenting the full-scale war and earlier works that address the geopolitical events slightly preceding the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea. The artists offer a deep analysis of the meaning, background, and effects of the war, highlighting Ukrainians' courage, unity, and unbreakable spirit. The presentation focuses on the strength that withstands pain and losses; it is about freedom, which Ukrainians hold sacred.

"She Asked, I Followed. Her Name Is After" is a project about Ukrainians. It's about the Ukrainians who do the impossible every day; who woke up at 5 AM on February 24 as one united organism and inspired the whole world to rise; who have their voice, dignity, and unity; who refuse to stay silent; who dare to exist, live and create — in the here and now. It's about the country that defends its freedom and culture. It's about the culture that fights for its past, present, and future".

Max Voloshyn, curator and co-founder of Voloshyn Gallery

At this show, Nikita Kadan will present new works from the series Cheap Gas, Cheap Blood, created during the first month of the full-scale war against Ukraine. He worked on them at Voloshyn Gallery, which became his shelter at the time. Letter to a Turtledove is Dana Kavelina's antiwar poem-letter dedicated to the history of Donbas, "its traumas, anguish, nightmares, dreams and hallucinations." Kavelina explores the war through various frameworks, including a feminist perspective, describing rape "as an inevitable result of any military engagement."

Mykola Ridnyi created his video Seacoast as a response to the Russo-Georgian War 6 years before Russia's invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. Filmed at the Black Sea coast, the video depicts a static horizon dotted with figures of fishermen. Scenes of jellyfish splattering on the ground occasionally break the view's serenity. The main association is the sound of dropping bombs, created with an audio recording of a jet's frequency. The video conveys the instability and relativity of calmness in a world where military aggression can escalate fast.

Pavlo Kerestey's paintings address relations between artists and institutions of power, workers' rights, migrants' rights, and more. Tackling the image of Armageddon, the artist fills his paintings with fire. And Vlada Ralko will present her Signs series, addressing identity issues within a socio-political context while delving into the existential pain and suffering of the collective body politic. Ralko's Signs series remains one of the most important projects of the artist's career. The works resist unambiguous interpretations, at least ostensibly. When Ralko began working on them in 2008, she anticipated the question, "What does this mean?" Instead of explaining, she offers decontextualization as a challenge and element of vulnerability. Ralko attempts to put her audience through a U-turn, creating a vicious circle: where each question without an answer produces more doubt. These works depict something like a break, something that comes outside by damaging the body from the inside.

The new videowork Sky. Invasion by Daniil Revkovskiy and Andriy Rachinskiy is intended to show the fragility of the sky and the fear of looking at it, inherent to people with traumatic experiences. he compilation of founded footage presents the sky with the daily cycle: morning, afternoon, evening, night, morning. This is sky over Ukraine in various states, before and during the russian-ukrainian war. The end of the video is the sun close up, similar to an explosion of a hydrogen bomb. The sound of the video is the Russian military frequency 4625. One can hear the voice of a man who in Russian calls numbers and names without any meaning. There is one version that frequency 4625 is part of the Perimeter nuclear complex. A complex for automatic control of a massive retaliatory nuclear strike, created in the USSR at the height of the Cold War and used by Russia.

Lesia Khomenko will present her works from the Congenial Work series, analyzing the doctrine and term coined by the Ukrainian idealist philosopher Hryhoriy Skovoroda (1722–1794). Khomenko brings this notion to the present context and attempts to integrate it into the field of critical discourse by juxtaposing it to the still relevant Marxist idea of "alienated work." The figures of workers are inscribed into the image, leaving the impression that the painting is "too small" for them. Their legs rest on the painting's edge while their heads are squeezed into a corner; sometimes, they don't even fit into the painting. This formal method is a metaphor for the social and economic conditions that the workers currently face. The base in soft colors serves as the background for these figures. For Lesia, these neutral colors of "cutting-edge interior design" symbolize illusory happiness and material well-being. The juxtaposition of these colors and the "squeezed-in" workers lends the painting's dramatic tension.