Lada Nakonechna. Popular View series. 2012 — present. Transfer print, graphite on paper. Variable sizes within 30 × 40 cm

Series description

Popular View: Looking through the lilac in the Kyiv Botanical Garden, towards the Dnipro River series reproduces a number of photographs taken from the same spot in the lilac garden of the M. M. Hryshko National Botanical Garden in Kyiv. From here, one gets a picturesque view of the Dnipro River, framed by the golden domes of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra and blooming lilacs in April. This view is widely circulated in photos taken by visitors to the garden, on media portals, tourist postcards, and posters.

Nakonechna finds these photographs online, prints them in black and white, and uses pencil to shade in all the light areas of the images. By muting the contrast, she calls into question the role of photography itself—both in mass media and in the context of a unique artistic work, balancing between instant capture and the long process of image-making. The darkened surface challenges the photographic image, which usually conveys a romanticized representation of the city, its history, and potential.

Yevgenia Belorusets on Lada Nakonechna’s Popular View series

“I look at these works by Lada Nakonechna again and again, and it seems to me that the artist does not even reinterpret the photograph, but, out of a series of premises, creates a photograph that cannot be realized, becoming entangled in its own multiplication. The photograph, a testimony that captures space in order to assert the significance of a moment in time, is reproduced as a statement of the failure of its mission, the impossibility of creating any significance.

Lada Nakonechna’s landscape, gleaming with black abysses, seems like a message from the realm of lost opportunities for space to unfold as a panorama, into which history has managed to weave foreign gazes, which our presence either denies or affirms. Lada creates a copy and a drawing in which I feel the absence of history as one of the losses concerning both the imagined shared experience and the individual gaze in search of a view[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