Lada Nakonechna (*1981 Dnipropetrovsk, UA)

Marking 1 & 2, acquired by the EPO art collection in 2022

Marking 1 and Marking 2 are black-and-white transfer prints of the same motif: an apartment building obscured by dense trees and undergrowth. However, each version of the image is so heavily overlayed with colour that only traces of the original print remain visible. The colours are like a filter: black, blue and red like the flag of the internationally unrecognised, Russian-occupied “Donetsk People’s Republic”; black and blue, more like two of the basic colours of the flag of the Ukrainian administrative district of Donetsk Oblast. Identical territory, different markings, different allegiances. These artworks raise fundamental questions about how we create a sense of belonging through ways of looking at and situating ourselves in our surroundings; as well as questions about ways of looking at art, signs, symbols and flags. Suggestions of creases in the paper imply that they may once have been folded up like maps. The very act of interpretation becomes fraught with tensions, the kind of tensions that are everywhere in occupied territory.

As a politically engaged artist, Lada Nakonechna plays here on the aesthetics of the surface and the impenetrable depth of cultural landscapes, as well as the sense in which images can both express and conceal. Her artistic practice invites reflection on the politics of territory and the mapping of territories, as well as the implications of raising a flag as borders shift arbitrarily. Nakonechna, who lives in Kyiv, Ukraine, also reflects here on the relative distance between images and their viewers, the often unfamiliar localities of conflict and how far analysis can take us. Caught up in the undifferentiated motif and the imposition of pictorial planes in these artworks are the effects of (geo)political change on topographies of memory, history and identity.