Dymchuk Gallery presents ‘After the Blackout’: Serhiy Kondratiuk’s brand new project consisting of the works created after October 2022, when russian missile strikes targeting Ukrainian energy production infrastructure resulted in reoccurring electricity supply and mobile communication failures all over Ukraine. The project features painting, graphics, and sculpture.
‘Evening. 10 October 2022’ – one of the works in the project bears this title because it was exactly then that the first blackout happened in Kyiv, marking the beginning of a whole period of darkness due to electricity failures. The artist surveyed the outlines of the city in nearly total darkness, and created a series of urban landscapes, some dedicated specifically to Podil. Familiar streets filled with rushing citizens day in, day out, changed, but citizens themselves also changed. It was very soon that people equipped themselves with flashlights and light-reflecting bracelets, and the air grew filled with the hum coming from power generators standing by every door. Russian strikes aimed at submerging the Ukrainian society in darkness, but no darkness lasts forever.
‘It was only in spring when we realized what we all had gone through last autumn and winter. Everyone understands now what a ‘blackout’ is. Days started growing longer, sunshine that we were so short of before, now flooded the streets of Kyiv. Fortunately, we don’t need candles or flashlights any longer’, the author says.
Serhiy Kondratiuk was born in 1988 in Krasnokutsk, Kharkiv oblast. In 2005-2008 he studied in the Kharkiv State School of Art, proceeding with his education in the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Fine Arts in 2010-2016. The artist now lives and works in Kyiv, being a member of the artistic community of the Kyiv Institute of Automatics.