Yarema Malashchuk & Roman Khimei: The Wanderer

The latest work by Ukrainian artists Yarema Malashchuk & Roman Khimei shows strange scenes in nature. Again and again one sees how the two artists position their bodies to get as close as possible to a model (invisible to us), and with “raz, dva, tri” (“one, two, three”) give the signal for the shooting of a photo.
With this work Malashchuk & Khimei refer to a classic of contemporary Ukrainian art – to the photo series “If I were a German” produced by the Fast Reaction Group in Kharkiv in 1994. In this series, produced in the 1990s, the artists and their friends reenact German Wehrmacht soldiers during the occupation of Kharkiv in World War II. Malashchuk & Khimei repeat this gesture and reenact the Russian occupiers during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The title of the video refers, on the one hand, to the famous romantic painting “The Wanderer over the Sea of Fog” (c. 1818) by Caspar David Friedrich, and on the other hand, to the Russian soldiers who are “wanderers” in today's Ukraine.

Yarema Malashchuk & Roman Khimei were already part of the HMKV exhibition Can't Get You Out Of My Head, which took place in seven Dortmund-based clubs in 2021.

Collaborating at the edge of visual art and cinema since 2013, Kyiv-based artists and filmmakers Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk graduated as cinematographers from the Institute of Screen Arts in Kyiv, Ukraine. They were awarded the main award of the PinchukArtCentre Prize (2020), VISIO Young Talent Acquisition Prize (2021), Best Short Documentary at Festival Internacional de Cine Silente México (2019), as well as the Grand Prix at the Young Ukrainian Artists Award (MUHi 2019). Their debut documentary feature “New Jerusalem” premiered at Docudays UA International Film Festival 2020. The film received the Special Mention Award at Kharkiv MeetDocs and the duo were also recently participated at Future Generation Art Prize 2021, a prestigious international award for artists under 35 years of age.

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