Yarema Malashchuk & Roman Khimei: Dedicated to the Youth of the World II

 

As artists and filmmakers, Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Himey explore the crowd as an equal figure in history and culture. The focus of the video is the techno-rave Cxema and the youth, on which the camera is carefully focused the next morning after the event. The space of Dovzhenko’s film-studio is transformed into a dancefloor, a synchronized crowd, spotlights, arrhythmic synthetic sound by Stanislav Tolkachev — the camera moves away and approaches, creating a sense of romantic “exaltation” and at the same time a modern “alienation”. This is the place and meeting that the youth of Kyiv are waiting for and preparing for — this particular escape from everyday life, rejection of it — evokes strange feelings of modern ritual. But what does it mean? The film ends with “portraits”, almost static shots, faces “after” utopia. Characters of the film are not ready to accept the new day and its old reality.

Yarema Malashchuk (b. 1993), Roman Himey (b. 1992) in Kolomyya (Ukraine), live and work in Kiev. In 2020 they were awarded the PinchukArtCentre Prize. In 2021 they were represented with this video in Can't Get You Out Of My Head - an international exhibition of HMKV (curated by Inke Arns and Fabian Saavedra-Lara) about club culture in seven Dortmund clubs – which at the time were closed due to pandemic.

Credit: Video still, Yarema Malashchuk & Roman Himey, „Dedicated to the Youth of the World II”, 2019.