Polina Davydenko – Cosmoses of Justice and Ordinariness

I'm splayed on the floor. It's hot. And I don't want to do anything. But I've got deadlines running through my head. I go to study Polina Davydenko's (*1995) work again where the question "is today Wednesday?" ambushes me in the video from thumb to little finger. It rattles me a little. Somewhere inside me a red beacon lights up. Should I rather finish this or get a pedicure? The moodiness, the timelessness, and the trouble of procrastination that I feel firsthand from that video has fallen on me. The playfulness of painting your nails, creating "high" art on such an absurd format as nails, aka canvas. But the project has its social overlaps – through it, the artist met with her friends during the pandemic, not only to maintain human contact but also to allow the art to venture out, outside the zone of the virtual world and its consumption.

The video and installation Willy Nilly (2021) tells of "lil' luck". The phenomenon of Willy the killer whale, aka Keiko, its story and the film of the same name, Save Willy (in which the killer whale was "miraculously rescued" thanks to its viewers and was transported to its original habitat), which was followed by almost the whole world, refers to the ironic and sad issue of not only human consumerism but also the issues of emigration, forced capture and manipulation of living creatures and their domination through the power of media. The everyday mundanity that Davydenko exacerbates in her works is also perceived in her photographs, which communicate global hot topics and the crisis of our time (the Offline and Dravci series, etc.). In the photographs, one can observe the demonstration of the observed and the observer, which is an important moment in the images. Although Davydenko characterizes herself more as a photographer, she increasingly moves towards moving image, installation, events or performance. Her recent video Public Tinnitus (2021) responds to coal mining in the town of Dobropolye. Narrated through a piece of coal that sings a ballad, it compares the community of miners and the work there to a bee colony. Artificial exchanges (coal for money, sugar for honey) are thus unconsciously accepted by all of us without being fully aware of the pervasive system. The name thus refers to an ever-increasing sound that we first accept but then can no longer live with.

Text: Tea Záchová

Image captions

1 | Polina Davidenko, From Thumb to Little Finger, 2021
2–3 | Polina Davidenko, From Thumb to Little Finger, video, Black Box, TIC Gallery, Brno 2020–2021
4–6 | Polina Davidenko, Willy Nilly, instalation, XY Gallery, Olomouc, 2021
7–8 | Polina Davidenko, Kutilka, video, 2022