REPEAT AFTER ME, 2024
one-channel video installation, karaoke, video, 40'43'', edition 5+2AP (left 2)
Open Group – Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach and Anton Varga
LINK TO A TRAILER
Repeat after Me (2024) is a collective portrait of witnesses of the ongoing war in Ukraine. The protagonists are civilian refugees speaking of the war through the sounds of weapons they remember, then inviting the audience to repeat after them. While the first part was filmed in the summer of 2022 in Lviv, the locations of the second part of the film (2024) Poland, Austria, Germany, Lithuania, Ireland, USA — make quite a contrast and are definitely safe: camps, hotels, dormitories, all temporary places for refugees, which hosted displaced people from Ukraine. Yet even beyond the reach of the marathon of sirens, the sounds of war remain part of their trauma and symbolically widen their scope. Yet here the accompaniment is not hit songs, it is shots, missiles, howling, and explosions, and the lyrics are descriptions of deadly firearms. This is the soundtrack of the war.
A few weeks before the Russian invasion, the Centre for Strategic Communication and Information Security of the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy began distributing brochures titled In Case of Danger or War, explaining how best to behave in a zone of military activity. The instructions differ depending on whether the attack is coming from automatic rifles, artillery fire, multiple rocket launchers, or an air raid. The ability to recognise these sounds saves their lives and we learn the language of their experience. Repeat after Me shows war as a collective experience, regardless of age, background, professional and social status, giving witnesses the floor and calling attention to individual experiences of this catastrophe.
At the end of his book Sonic Warfare (2009), Steve Goodman paraphrases a famous quote by Deleuze, swapping ‘to look’ for ‘to listen’: ‘There is no need to fear or hope, but only to ... [listen] ... for new weapons.’ When it comes to recognizing the future of war by its sounds, in the two years since the start of the war, the entire population of Ukraine has been listening closely to the new weapons used against them with the aim of terror and extermination. One of the new sounds the collective had to add to the new part of the project was the infamous Iranian Shahed-136 kamikaze drones. Since the early autumn of 2022, these drones have been used by Russia for massive attacks to destroy civilian, energy, and critical infrastructure (by the end of February 2024, a total of 4,588 Shahed-136s had been launched against Ukraine). Many Ukrainians will forever remember the distinctive loud hum of the Shaheds engines in the night sky and the disturbing sudden silence just before they are ready to land on their target.
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. Cause the whole world is an area of displacement and flight, and shelter has no single, certain location. Repeat after me 2024 speaks of all refugees of the world.
director: OPEN GROUP — Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga
cast: Natalia, Hanna, Anya, Samir, Tymofii, Yana, Vlad, Anastasia, Ira, Inna, Valerii, Maria, Halyna, Maryna, Tetiana, Taisia
production manager: Viktoriia Dorr
director of photography: Dmytro Churikov, Tomi Hazhlinsky, Justin Warsh
editors: Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga, Dmytro Churikov
film editing: Dmytro Churikov
colour correction: Artem Stretovych
sound / sound design: Piotr Blajerski
translation: Iryna Kurhanska
The producer of Repeat after Me (2024) is Zachęta – National Gallery of Art.
This film was created specially for the Repeat after Me ll exhibition presented at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, in the Polish Pavilion in Venice (20.04–24.11.2024).
Curator: Marta Czyż.
Polish participation in the 60th International Art Exhibition in Venice is financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland.
© Open Group: Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga, 2024
The video work Repeat after Me 2024 was created with the involvement of refugees staying in Wrocław (Poland), Vienna (Austria), Berlin (Germany), Vilnius (Lithuania), New York (USA)
and Tullamore (Ireland).
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THE WORK "REPEAT AFTER ME" (2024) WAS PRESENTED AT:
2025 FIPADOC, a non-fiction festival in Biarritz, France.
2025 Familiar Strangers, Bozar, Brussel, Belgium.
2024 Next Level Festival in Dortmund, Germany.
2024 Double Feature, screening and discussion, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany.
2024 Repeat After Me 2024, Museum on Opener festival, Gdynia, Poland.