The first solo exhibition in Poland by the Ukrainian artist Valentyn Odnoviun will present photographic series devoted to places of forced isolation. The works, created mainly in Lithuania, Ukraine, Latvia, Poland and Germany over the course of eight years, result from his interest in contextual photography and post-Soviet reality. The artist looks for places of totalitarian violence, analyzes their appearance in order to photograph them in an unobvious way. These photos are part of the recorded but unseen history of World War II and communism in Eastern Europe. They create archives of traces of the presence of isolated, imprisoned and exterminated people. Thanks to formal procedures, Odnoviun’s photographs gain ambiguity. The peepholes of old prison cells, illuminated sheets of photographic paper or the surfaces of building walls create surprising visual qualities, closer to abstraction than substantive registration. Odnoviun refers in his work to, among others: to Polish threads, one of the PW44 series is devoted to the Warsaw Uprising. Another one, Horizons, contains a work made in a former Gestapo prison, then the UB prison in Gdańsk. The artist draws attention to the continuity of historical use of the same places. By creating specific archives of evidence, he reflects on history, human nature and the ever-recurring threat to human freedom.

Valentyn Odnoviun – born in 1987 in Kharkov, Ukraine. He has been living and working in Vilnius for a decade. He belongs to the Lithuanian Photographers’ Union. Graduate of the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts at the Faculty of Photography and Media Art (2016) and Theory and History of Art (2019). He also studied in 2015 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich as part of the Erasmus program. He is currently working on his PhD at the Lithuanian Institute for Cultural Research. He is the winner of residency scholarships and awards at international festivals, including: in New Zealand, the USA and many European countries. Explores the potential of photography as an unlimited medium, opening the viewer to multidirectional interpretation. At the same time, his work is the voice of a generation that is working through the difficult communist legacy of Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland. It reminds us of the existence of regimes in the context of contemporary threats and social divisions.

More information: https://www-gdansk-pl.translate.goog/wydarzenia/valentyn-odnoviun-echa-niewidzianych,w,30901?_x_tr_sl=pl&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=pl&_x_tr_pto=wapp