SOSкa Group. Forest. 2009. Four-channel video installation, 2′30″
Work Description
This is another work by the SOSka group, in which the artists observed the subcultures of that time. One of the group members filmed a subcultural rock concert at the Fort nightclub in Kharkiv, near the Kholodna Hora metro station, at the address: 123 Poltavskyi Shlyakh Street, which opened at the end of the 1990s. The club combined live concerts with electronic parties and was a place for presenting black metal, and later — deathcore and post-hardcore [1]. The video was shot in night mode. It captures fragments of one of the slams in which visitors participated, but the concert sound is absent in the final version. The artists replaced the musicians’ playing with the singing of forest birds: pleasant chirping gradually turns into anxious cries corresponding to how the meditative dance changes into a fight on the dance floor.
Comment by Mykola Ridnyi, 2025
“This work is based on the balance between aggression and care. Behind beautiful bird singing, predatory birds often hide. Birds can also take very sweet care of each other: cleaning feathers and beaks, but be aggressive towards other species. Another aspect is multiplicity, in which we often observe birds: some species exist in groups of their kind. Many similarities can be found in teenage subcultures. Slam is a good example of the balance between aggression and care. In a slam, people can really hit each other, or they can catch someone who is falling and generally “dissolve” in the euphoria of movements. A similar dynamic of collective euphoria can be observed in the rave phenomenon, but the 2000s were the time of emo, not techno.”
