Mykola Ridny’s new films, one of Ukraine’s most successful young artists, participant of the 56th Venice Biennale Main Exhibition, and twice a contributor to the Ukrainian Pavilion.
As part of the Garage Screen. The New program, Garage Museum will show the latest works of Mykola Ridny—a documentary video essay Gray Horses and NO! NO! NO!, that tell stories of particular people in historical and political dimensions.
In Gray Horses, the artist raises the issues of identity, excavating archival materials, related to life and practice of his great-grandfather—a Ukrainian anarchist Ivan Krupsky. Shot in Poltava, Kharkiv, Gadyach, and Bogodukhov, the film restages episodes from the contradictory life of Ridny’s great-grandfather, who founded a rebel unit during the Civil War, served under Nestor Makhno, worked in the Soviet militia, and as a plant builder. The story is interspersed with interviews with activists, students, workers, and mounted policemen who live in present-day Ukraine. The notion of gray in the title is of no coincidence, as all members of the Krupsky unit had horses of the same coat color.
NO! NO! NO!’s protagonists are contemporary Kharkiv citizens, who had turned twenty by the start of the military conflict in Eastern Ukraine, including a fashion model, a street-artist, and a poet who is also an LGBT activist. All of them continue to live actively and creatively, although “the proximity of the war”, using the director’s words, “impacts each of the characters and their practices. The heroes of the film contemplate and react on political events through their relationship with the urban environment and the reality of the social media”.
Following the screenings, joining the author of the film will be director, curator and the organizer of the International Kansk Video Festival, Andrey Silvestrov, and art historian and critic Gleb Napreenko.