Lada Nakonechna. From the Merge Visible series. 2015–2017. Found footage, photographs with cut-out and drawing. 62 x 86 cm

The title of this photo series references a function in graphic editors that merges all visible image layers. Lada Nakonechna leaves little visible to the viewer’s eye: she takes found photographs of towns and villages in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions—places that experienced destruction from the Russian invasion—and removes all elements showing this destruction. What remains are abstract geometric compositions that involuntarily evoke avant-garde art techniques and forms. The artist labels each photo Composition No., turning this resemblance into a conscious artistic gesture. Thus, the formal aspect is undercut by the conceptual: the white voids recall war crimes that are erased, forgotten, or deleted. What has become the backdrop for the “compositions” simultaneously signifies loss and irretrievability.

Yevgenia Belorusets on Lada Nakonechna’s Merge Visible work

“It seems that the artist tried to save reality. She carefully removed the destruction from it and made room for a void that will be filled with something else, which can be “restored.” I had to put this word in quotation marks because a chasm immediately opens up between the void and the possibility of restoring something: the materials for restoration are merely fragments of reality—what still remains untouched, intact. If destruction served as a kind of support for her, preserving and creating at least the illusion that something existed, even in a destroyed state, then the absence of this support is felt as a lack of material. In this network of intersecting lines, nothing can be built, not even with a glance. The surviving details are wires, the interconnections between things, their communication, but the things themselves are no longer there; they no longer exist. Is it time to come to terms with the fact that we have lost something in this war?[1]”

1. Євгенія Бєлорусець. «Працюючи з фотографією» (переклад з російської Катерини Бадянової) // Наконечна Лада. Дисципліноване бачення : каталог виставок. — Київ : Майстер книг, 2022. — 176 с. С. В.54