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Photo & VideoVideoVideo profiles of 20 nominees for the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2018Dmytro StarusievIn his art practice, Dmytro Starusiev engages with analogue photographic processes, with their sense of unpredictability, tactility and handmade character that allow the viewer to perceive each work as a physical object. The documentation of the emotional dimension of reality, as expressed in abstract compositions and expressed through the medium of photography, is of primary importance to the artist.
The artist creates large-scale analogue photographs in museum-style frames, actualizing the discussion about the very essence of the photographic medium and its autonomy. He breaks it free of the canons and stereotypes that guided it previously. He seems to affirm the prognosis voiced in The Dictionary of Received Ideas by Gustave Flaubert, namely, that daguerreotype will “replace painting.” A photographic canvas is perceived as a painting, and the properties of analogue photography emancipate it from its function of documenting reality, creating sensuous liminal images that marginalize the object and foreground experience as such instead.
The idea of the Three Sisters’ Story series first emerged when the artist stood on the border of three states: Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. These works combine low fleshly experience (mutilated bodies, chopped innards, new life sprouting from empty, scooped out voids) with religious awe, the elevated sense of reverence, wonder and fear at something beyond words and touch, something lofty and important. These images are evocative of the Biblical “the windows of heaven were opened” and reflect on the beginning and the end, the nonexistence and existence beyond time. Large-format photographs are constituted of two parts: a product of a purely technological limitation, these sutures are evocative of scarred human flesh, mutilated vaginas, abutting borders and territories.
