REPEAT AFTER ME II

Realized: 20.04–24.11.2024

Polish Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

 

Open Group (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach and Anton Varga)

curator: Marta Czyż

commissioner: Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz (to 13 May 2024), Hanna Wróblewska (from 13 May 2024)

organiser: Zachęta — National Gallery of Art
polish pavilion office: Michał Kubiak, Anna Kowalska

exhibition design: CENTRALA — Małgorzata Kuciewicz, Simone De Iacobis

 

 

Repetition helps us remember things we want to keep from forgetting. The Repeat after Me II exhibition at the Polish Pavilion gives us spoken testimonies of civilian victims/survivors of the war in Ukraine, who share their experiences with us. They recreate recalled sounds of weapons so that we can repeat after them. They pass on their means of survival, but also their trauma, which will stay with them for all their lives. 

Open Group was inspired to create this project in 2022 by a brochure, In Case of Emergency or War, which the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and Information Policy’s Centre for Strategic Security and Safety Information began distributing a few weeks before the Russian invasion. It explained how to behave in a war zone depending on whether the attack in question was machine-gun fire, artillery fire, many rocket-launchers, or an air raid. In two videos (2022 and 2024), Open Group gave the floor to war witnesses, who were able to salvage their lives through their ability to recognise the sounds of weaponry. 

To acquaint the exhibition’s viewers with the experiences of the video’s protagonists, the artists have used karaoke, a form of pop music entertainment from Japan. At the Polish Pavilion exhibition, the films are projected on opposite walls, microphones are placed in front of the screens, and in between there is a futuristic military karaoke bar. The protagonists of either film introduce themselves, and then present their weapon of choice — the one that most lingers in their memory. Then they imitate its sounds and invite the audience to do the same, saying ‘repeat after me’. Viewers can repeat the sounds of the weapons or withdraw into the back space of the bar. Yet this is not an ordinary bar — the music here is not radio hits, but shots, rockets, howling and explosions, and the text is descriptions of lethal weapons. This is the soundtrack of a war, which the witnesses try to replicate. The audience is invited to take part in a series of repetitions, standing between the two films, in which the sounds of weapons ring out like an endless refrain. ‘Repeat after me’, the refugees tell us, encouraging us to step into their shoes, though of course this is impossible until we have shared their experience. Empathetic participation aims to wrench us from a state of passivity. When we learn a foreign language, we often repeat the new sounds and words out loud — ‘repeat after me’, the refugees tell us, and we, repeating after them, learn the language of their experience. 

This work is a collective portrait of its protagonists’ trials, and at the same time, a record of individual experiences of a catastrophe. At a first glance, the video looks like a social probe. We might see a distant echo of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s documentary Talking Heads of 1980. This was the director’s response to a series of articles by critic Zygmunt Kałużyński in 1971, in which he questioned the artistic value of films of the Polish School of Documentaries, accusing its adherents of using the banal ‘talking heads’ convention. Kieślowski proved that this convention had major power, capable of forging a special relationship between the viewer and the documentary’s subjects. In Talking Heads people speak to the camera about a pressing need for freedom, democracy, and human respect. The protagonists of the video invited by Open Group, regardless of their age, origin, professional or social status, also turn to face the viewer, make close contact with them, inviting them to repeat, though their position and the content of their statements are quite different. They speak of what they have encountered, and their dream is merely to survive. Kieślowski builds an atmosphere of hon- est conversation filled with hope, Open Group focuses on the basic value that is human life. 

Repeat after Me II brings together some vital features that define Open Group’s practice, based on creating ‘open situations’ in an interaction process whose factors are time and space, as well as relationships. The artists decided to show two similarly constructed films from different phases of the war, building a narrative that stresses the war’s grim continuity. Repeat after Me of 2022 is a picture of war seen from the inside — here the only sense of peace comes from the summer landscape and the protagonists’ static poses. ‘Internal refugees’ who escaped from east to west Ukraine are allowed to speak. In the video from 2024, the witnesses’ stories come from an international community. The protagonists come from Ukraine and are now living abroad, in other European cities — Wrocław, Berlin, Vienna, Vilnius and Tullamore (Ireland), as well as New York — among many other refugees.The new perspective means the protagonists have a different state of mind: in Ukraine they were still in a state of readiness, of constant threat; abroad, they experience returning trauma. The change in locales in the second film expands the refugees’ geography, but also shows the protagonists at a point when the war has been continuing for two years and has left its mark on our everyday lives. The protagonists’ statements add information about the countries in which they have refugee contacts. This is of particular importance today, when we are simultaneously observing genocide in Gaza, a growing conflict between China and Taiwan, and other ongoing armed conflicts, not to mention the recent vast influx of refugees to Europe from such countries as Libya, Syria, Yemen, and many others. Each of these conflicts becomes a powder keg for the planet, another crisis, a sickness of the world flaring up in many places at once. 

In Repeat after Me of 2022, the protagonists share an experience of the war live, while the work from 2024 is more of a tale of remembering the sounds they experienced. The second video also shows a shift in the social mood. In 2022 the response to the full-scale invasion by Russia, after the initial shock, was opposition, global mobilisation and immediate assistance, a prevailing sense of power and unity in a shared goal. In 2024 the mood is different — help is delayed or fails to arrive, the lack of ammunition and support is causing hope for a quick end to the war to fade. Western countries are increasingly counting their domestic losses, giving in to pressures of societal fatigue, more conflicts are emerging and one war is beginning to obscure another. 

The weaponry used in Ukraine has been used in every armed conflict since the twentieth century, and thus is an instrument of oppression familiar to all war victims over the past few decades. All the witnesses’ tales come from Ukraine, but they could, and aim to serve as a universal, collective portrait of refugees from around the world, always represented by the same, shared sounds. Today the voices of these Ukrainian protagonists could be replaced by Palestinians, Yemeni, Libyans, Syrians or Haitians. This is why, in the 2024 work, the Ukrainian refugees who were recorded in various parts of Europe supplement their responses from the video of 2022. 

Sometimes the speakers mention particular countries — Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Palestine — sometimes they speak of people they’ve met from around the world, of the language barrier, everything that makes the geography of the refugee, the geography of the war. Refugee status has no one place of origin. Today the whole world is a zone of resettlement and flight, and shelter has no certain location. It is a world of fluid citizenship, full of emigrants and refugees. The concept of citizenship is reshaping with the influx of ‘new’ citizens. Yet many states are blocking access to civil rights, appealing to sovereignty and national unity. The refugee crisis has joined the climate catastrophe to become one of the urgent problems of the twenty-first century. 

Repeat after Me II broadens the limits of representation by providing an opportunity to share more than personal experiences, life stories, and spaces. The ‘Open’ in the collective’s name means limitless space, but also an openness to taking on new ideas or proposals; joined with ‘Group’ it adds participation and authorship of an infinite number of people. Their work questions what is perceived as the work of a defined collective, whose final effect is a completed work, and collapses the geographical boundaries defining the nationality of the artists, thus breaking down the idea of the national pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia. 

*** 

Survivors’ testimonies are documents of the crimes of the Second World War, they stand as proof in the legal sense, but they also relay individual experiences. According to Tony Kushner, hearing and writing down these reports is a form of ‘rescue archaeology’, authenticated by a dwindling number of survivors. Testimonies collected today are not only to meet the demands of rescue archaeology, but also to reach the largest number of people at the time of their creation, as an alternative to media reports. This is why scholars and workers in various organisations are presently driven not only by a desire to bring direct help, but also to document the experience of war and being a refugee. These actions have been taken up alongside aid initiatives, especially after the first reports of Russian crimes, such as those in Bucha and Mariupol. As it turns out, for people of the older generation who survived the Second World War, reports of war crimes are a harrowing experience. It shows how painfully far we are from learning the lessons of history. Their recollections take on a recurring pattern: often there is a description of a place, a situation, a story of hovering on the verge between life and death. Sometimes they also describe individual situations or details apprehended by the senses in a peculiar way, encoding and activating later trauma. It is in this space that sounds appear. Through collecting these testimonies of audio memories, Repeat after Me II is an attempt to draw individuals out of their silence. 

Eyewitness statements are an essential part of shaping and recording historical truth. They are of enormous value, and not only as proof in court trials to bring crimes to justice and punish culprits. They build our knowledge of the past based on individual and collective memory. Repeat after Me II is a voice from the epicentre of the war. It is present-day proof of a tragedy taking place before our eyes, it gives us a tangible sense of the nightmare. We look at witnesses, we stand face to face with them, we look them in the eye. And they have one thing to tell us: ‘Repeat after me’. The repetition becomes a performative part of the work, it permits empathy, breaks down the distance between the protagonist and the viewer as far as possible. At the same time, we glean just a shade of resistance on the protagonists’ faces. As Kateryna Iakovlenko writes, ‘the people have collectively refused to be victimised and have spoken out loud, in unison, about the need for accounts from their own voices, their particular political and cultural position .... This experience is a collaborative practice of presence.’

*** 

Some day the war will end, but its echoes will remain in the memories of its witnesses for always and return when least expected. The protagonists of Repeat after Me II try to describe the experience that caused them to unerringly recognise the sound of rockets overhead, how different weapons sound. This ability says something not only about the reality in which Ukrainians now live, it also shows a universal experience of people living in zones of armed conflict — when life is at stake, the senses are honed, life can depend on a sharp eye or a sensitive ear. Initially, this work was created with people outside of Ukraine in mind, to communicate the atmosphere of the war. It might be conceived as instructions or a compendium of highly detailed knowledge that war witnesses are sharing with viewers/future users. This also makes it a warning. 

From the moment we hear the first alarm and the first shot rings out, the body is in a state of readiness. We remain tense, we listen to every sound, every murmur. The sounds of war sometimes mingle with silence. In his book Dormitory, Serhii Zhadan describes a train station full of people waiting for a train, taking cover from gunfire: ‘... after the explosion the muffled howling began, then it was silent. And then again the silence burst outside the window and the howling resumed.’ 

How many times must you hear a sound to grow accustomed to it, how many times must you repeat a syllable to tear it from its original meaning and make it become just an abstract rhythmic sound? The artists at the Polish Pavilion ask if we really want to take part in this faux-entertainment. In the pavilion’s set design, the line between pop culture and the reality of war is fluid. We enter a mock-up of a karaoke bar, but in fact we enter a space of an extreme personal experience that engages all the senses. In the laidback atmosphere of pop entertainment we gain knowledge that could serve us when war begins to fill our daily lives (not just through our television screens). Karaoke here be- comes a method of communication between protagonists/ witnesses of war and the public, in a situation where the former are unable to pass on their experience in any other way, and are making the effort to instruct strangers. The simulated sounds evoke ambivalent feelings. They prompt anxiety when we understand what lies behind them, but we also know that what is now recalled in the film as sounds of trauma once saved the protagonists’ lives. These various aspects of the sounds coexist in a natural way. They also contrast with the origins of the sounds as something that comes from nature and emulates it, as onomatopoeia. 

The pavilion’s set walks a thin line between pop culture and the reality of war. Between the screens with the microphones there is metal furniture like the kind used in the field, which is not designed to provide comfort. In the black space of the pavilion with dark-red touches, red spotlights shine. Colour becomes a crucial element, working on the senses like the tones that fill the scenery of war. Tomasz Szerszeń describes this in his book A Guest in a Catastrophe: ‘In March and April 2023 . . . many photographs and recordings from the Bakhmut region. Mud and rain. The colours are grey, brown, and dark green. Fatigue.’5 Szerszeń also mentions red against the backdrop of snow. There is also darkness, blackouts — power cuts make it difficult to function normally, but also hard to find a target during air raids. You enter the pavilion through a visual marker that can be seen from afar — a stiff curtain that blocks light from coming in, and frames the view of the garden for people leaving the experience of the exhibition. 

The scenery of both films is created by spaces strange to their protagonists — a camp for internal refugees made of provisional barracks, an airport turned into a refugee camp, hotels, rented flats, public places. These are temporary shelters where our homeless protagonists have become stuck in a state of limbo. 

Repeat after Me II deconstructs the iconography of the war, turning our attention to individual experiences. The victims’ portraits make a depiction of violence, stir anger, cause the stomach to ache, stick in the throat. Open Group draw from a language that is distant from the front lines, giving voice to people who have lost their homes, the spaces they identify with, and the loved ones that create it. The artists become translators of their stories, editors deciding on the form of repetition in multi-part works, inviting the viewer to repeat as well. War makes us accustomed to cruelty and destruction, which is why the iconography of the war should be based on human instincts, empathy, shared experience. Boris, one of the protagonists of Repeat after Me of 2022, turns to us with a direct message, which becomes a theme of the entire work: ‘Repeat after me, so you hear and never forget.’ 

Text SOUNDS OF SURVIVAL / SONGS OF APOCALYPTIC REALITY by Marta Czyż

 

 

 

Picture credit: Open Group (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga), Repeat after Me II, installation view, Polish Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, photo by Jacopo Salvi / Zachęta archive

 

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Poland’s participation in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia is made possible through the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.

 

sponsor: ORLEN

Exhibition partners: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, dela.art collection, Paradyż, Krupa Art Foundation

Publication supported by: DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office

Co-operation: Polish Institute in Rome

Media partner: Vogue Polska

Media patronage: Polskie Radio dla Zagranicy, Raport o stanie świata, TVP Kultura, TVP 2, Suspilne Media

Sponsor of the opening reception: Cisowianka Perlage