Voloshyn Gallery is proud to announce that artist Mykola Ridnyi is participating in Manifesta 16 Ruhr with a new two-channel moving image work Until You Disappear.
The piece revisits children's street games popular across the post-Soviet region in the 1990s — games that, beneath their playful surface, were built on discord, brutality, and violence. Ridnyi restages these games as a performative reenactment involving adult Ukrainian refugees and migrants, exposing how violence persists as a ritualized, gamified element carried from childhood into adulthood. The work's soundtrack is composed by Ukrainian post-metal band Machukha.
Accompanying documentary footage draws on the fiction film "Until the First Blood," which depicts a military-style children's game played at a Soviet summer camp, where participants are split into "blues" and "greens" and declared "dead" once their insignia are removed. Filmed in Crimea in 1989, years before Russia's annexation of the peninsula and the war that erupted in 2014. This archival footage serves as the reference point for Ridnyi's new work, titled "Until You Disappear". The title reflects on the current stage of the war as a vicious cycle of violence, in which both aggressor and victim see the complete obliteration of the enemy as the only possible resolution.
Dates: 21.06-04.10.2026
