Ukraine: In Search of Lost Identity
© Elena Subach
Elena Subach: Grandmothers on The Edge of Heaven (2018)
View Exhibition: Grandmothers on The Edge of Heaven
“In the modern world with rapidly developing technologies, the gap between generations is increasing. Nowadays, our grandmothers and we are separated not by two generations, but by an abyss.
They do not always know what the Internet is and what is the value of information in the modern world. They live with their post-war values, keep their savings in a scarf for a rainy day and procure products for the future. They carry in a purse a photo of their family next to the faces of Jesus and Mary because they also are family for them.
It seems to me that they are so full of memories of the past that nothing of the present can simply fit into this fullness.
They are among us now, but not really, because their consciousness is already awaiting the approaching moment to step outside the bounds of life and find themselves at the gates of Heaven, in which they desperately believe. Regardless of their confessions, grandmothers retell to each other articles about miraculous healings which they had read in newspapers and as evidence that there is life after death. I do not want to mistrust them at all, I only want to hug them and say that there is nothing to be afraid of and they are absolutely right.
In this project I am using direct photos and collages to place grandmothers in the landscapes of the Heaven that they are expecting.”
Elena Subach
View Exhibition: Grandmothers on The Edge of Heaven
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.