Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk: Youth of the World

Kyiv’s Youth Leaving a Grocery Store, 2017, HD video, sound, 3 min. 

Paying homage to the Lumiere brothers’ classic “Workers leaving the Lumiere Factory” and reconsidering the world’s first cinematic works, the artists address the redefining of labour and change in socioeconomic formation. Short but concise, the video probes questions about the transformation of a factory of production to one of consumption, the relationship between labour and leisure, and the paradoxes that can manifest in youths.

Dedicated to the Youth of the World, 2017, HD Video, sound, 3 min. 

The work’s title references the opening text in Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 propaganda film Olympia, commissioned for the Olympic Games in Germany, held the same year. Conceived as a video essay that mixes multiple narratives of 20th-century ideologies—Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg confronted with poet Walt Whitman, an icon of American democracy, and Nietzsche followed by a voice-over from Soviet officials—the portrayal of youth and others’ desires of them are presented here in a way that recalls the early Soviet aesthetics.

New City of Friends, 2021, HD Video, 10:44 min. 

In the video, a group of locals is accompanying a 15-year-old resident, Maksym, on his imaginary journey through Kolomyia—a city with a rich history in western Ukraine. Maksym takes his audience along the path near the Austrian barracks while drawing out possible routes through the city in the dirt with a stick. Against a backdrop of dominant Soviet modernist architecture, we hear Maksym’s accounts of the city, “…from Bandera Street, I go to the 10th School, from the 10th school I return to Kirov Park, from there I return here and see a well. I go from the well to the bookstore and from the bookstore….” His vivid and confident descriptions of his city starkly contrast with a Kolomyia depicted on screen: endless construction, houses constantly taken apart and put together, and the ghost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire coexisting in the post-Soviet reality.

So They Won’t Say We Don’t Remember, 2020, HD Video, 24 min. 

This video work is about hidden and visible elements of the post-industrial landscape of Donbas—a historically significant area in eastern Ukraine. In the film, a group of young locals, artists, and curators set out on a long journey following one of the underground routes of the Novator mine, where, in 1977, an accident claimed the workers’ lives and ultimately led to the mine’s closure. The endpoint of the group procession is the monument to the dead miners located just above the site of the underground accident. During the parade, the group walks through the city, plowed fields, forests, courtyards, and bushes, highlighting the intimate relationship between people and land. The video also reminds the viewers of the glues, social and historical, that hold generations of community together.