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The Wanderer

The Wanderer
/5
    • The Wanderer
  • 2022
  • 5 channel video-installation / single screen HD video, color, sound & no sound
  • 9min Duration: 3min, 54sec
“The Wanderer” was created shortly after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Here, Malashchuk and Khimei stage themselves as fallen Russian occupiers of Ukraine. With this gesture, the artists refer to a classic work of contemporary Ukrainian art: the series of photographs entitled “If I Were a German,” produced by Fast Reaction Group in 1994. Picking up on the title of this historical work, Malashchuk and Khimei ask questions about the German—and, more broadly, Western—view of the Russian war in Ukraine. The film’s title, their choice of frames, and the work’s mode of presentation refer to the famous romantic painting “The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” by Caspar David Friedrich as well as to its depicted figure’s colonizing attitude toward the landscape stretched out before him. It is more than just the romantic notion of death as something sublime that the artists are criticizing, here: placing fallen Russian soldiers in this context simultaneously points to and takes revenge upon them as the current colonizers of Ukraine, breaking the taboo associated with displaying dead bodies. K.RS.