Ukraine: In Search of Lost Identity
© Viacheslav Poliakov
Viacheslav Poliakov: Lviv–God’s Will (2017)
View Exhibition: Lviv–God’s Will
“Lviv–God’s Will comes from the name of a bus route that connects the city of Lviv with Bozha Volya (God’s Will in English), a small village lost deep in the forests along Ukraine’s border with the European Union — the promised land of wealth and eternal joy. The bus departs from the main gate of an old Lviv cemetery and travels west.
A naïve, visual subculture involving public space has become widespread throughout Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union and subsequent expansion of globalization. Makeshift sculptural scenes appear in the environment through accidental interactions and random interventions by unrelated people — products of indiscriminate behavior, mistakes, destruction, and natural vegetation running wild.
With the absence of professional planning and architectural support, residents now do what they can to improve the state of their streets and gardens. All of these influences contribute to a random terrain formed by coincidence, and to the unique aesthetics documented in this project.
Ultimately, nobody is responsible for this happenstance. It is all God’s will.”
Viacheslav Poliakov
View Exhibition: Lviv–God’s Will
About
Elena Subach and Viacheslav Poliakov are an artist duo based in Lviv. They create individual and joint projects. Their interests lie in the minutiae of everyday life in Western Ukraine’s cities, local religious ceremonies and artifacts of the Soviet past. They often digitally remove the background context around the “objets trouvés” in their images, filling it with vivid colors to filter out unimportant details. This technique gives their work a distinctive pop-art quality.