{"id":765,"date":"2022-08-22T11:54:58","date_gmt":"2022-08-22T11:54:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/discojournal.com\/?p=765"},"modified":"2024-05-13T11:46:26","modified_gmt":"2024-05-13T11:46:26","slug":"ukrainian-air-raid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/discojournal.com\/2022\/08\/ukrainian-air-raid\/","title":{"rendered":"Air Raid Camera Roll – Clemens Poole"},"content":{"rendered":"
CREATIVE<\/a>, <\/span>ESSAY<\/a>, <\/span>IMAGE<\/a>, <\/span>TECHNOLOGICAL PRESENT<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

By: Clemens Poole<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

AIR ALARM CAMERA ROLL<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Keywords: Ukraine; Lviv; war, war photography, digital practice <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Project Statement<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine plays tricks with time. War compresses aspects of the past and flattens expanses of the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are, of course, the grand narratives; the past is brought back, or projected into an imperial future of a new \u201cRussian world\u201d [\u0420\u0443\u0441\u0441\u043a\u0438\u0439 \u043c\u0438\u0440], a concept which merges the history of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the current Russian Federation into one seamless expression of manifest destiny. Consider the invaders\u2019 chillingly atemporal slogan \u201cwe can repeat\u201d [\u043c\u043e\u0436\u0435\u043c \u043f\u043e\u0432\u0442\u043e\u0440\u0438\u0442\u044c], which affirms an endless capacity for the glory of victory realized in \u201cThe Great Patriotic War\u201d [\u0412\u0435\u043b\u0438\u043a\u0430\u044f \u041e\u0442\u0435\u0447\u0435\u0441\u0442\u0432\u0435\u043d\u043d\u0430\u044f \u0432\u043e\u0439\u043d\u0430]. This slogan is an almost perfect affront to the rest of Europe\u2019s common chant of \u201cnever again\u201d, which emphasizes the horrors, rather than the glory, of World War II (even the episodic character of the common title \u201cWorld War II\u201d anchors its referent in history, in contrast to the superlative and timeless implications of its Russian counterpart).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
Read more<\/summary>
\n

There are personal narratives, too. Anxiety, truth, ambiguity and misinformation can coexist in a simple phone call from a loved one. Everything is simultaneously at a distance and right beside you, keeping you awake at night. An estimated twelve million people, in a country of more than forty million, have been displaced \u2014 seven million inside Ukraine itself, and five million abroad. These numbers are unimaginably large, but also minutely personal. Unless you talked to a friend yesterday, it is often impossible to say where they are today. At any given time they might call you from wherever they are, and you might answer, and if you do, after enduring the torture of the Telegram \u201cconnecting\u201d tri-tone jingle, you might connect. And then they might be in tears or they might just want to shoot the shit. Unlike the mythos of the grand narratives, personal narratives are hectically charged with uncertainty. Will today be the day? Will tomorrow? Will this air raid siren be the one? At times the simple act of coherent thought becomes heroic.[1]<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The war partly collapses time by ruthlessly curating our experiences, selecting insignificant moments from the continuum of our lives and attaching grotesque meaning to them. A photo\u2019s frame might capture the visual space of a personal moment, but the invisible brand of the image\u2019s metadata timestamp might describe an impossibly vast moment of vital significance to someone, somewhere. Platforms like Telegram paradoxically house up-to-the-minute information from official channels like that of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine [\u0412\u0435\u0440\u0445\u043e\u0432\u043d\u0430 \u0420\u0430\u0301\u0434\u0430 \u0423\u043a\u0440\u0430\u0457\u043d\u0438] and propaganda accounts dedicated to Kremlin disinformation. These channels merge together with messages from friends in cluttered timelines of public and private experience, making contemporary social media a space where acts of war insert themselves into both sides of our experience, occasionally with spooky simultaneity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many contemporary lens-based art practices shrug off the arbitrary in favor of the investigative. Data sets become important for their combined significance when cracking a forensic visual code (more often than not with the help of a placidly Harun Farocki-style narrator intoning dry, clinically incisive descriptions). While this tactic yields powerful critical work, its aim is often to clarify the mayhem of 21st century armed violence by uncovering causality and conspiratorial logic. Such works productively order Hito Steyerl\u2019s \u201cpoor images\u201d[2] <\/sup>by moving the aesthetics of war away from iconic and fetishized decisive moments like Robert Capra\u2019s Falling Soldier<\/em> (1936), and towards Forensic Architecture\u2019s crowd-sourced composite arguments. While the elegance of the the previous century\u2019s captured horror is still dredged for contemporary pathos and reflection by works like Nikita Kadan\u2019s Pogrom<\/em><\/a> (2016\u201317), 21st century horror is more likely to find its most poignant forms in sleekly lo-fi and impersonal works like Christoph B\u00fcchel\u2019s AC-130 Gunship Targeting Video (Afghanistan 12\/6\/2002)<\/em><\/a> (2004).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The emotional experience of Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine, however, seems to defy many of these tendencies. Mykola Ridnyi\u2019s various photographic works made in the early phase of the war under the title Blind Spot<\/em><\/a> (2014\u20132015) contain an ambiguity that seems to describe the violence with more clarity than, for example, Forensic Architecture\u2019s belabored Russian Strike on the Kyiv TV Tower<\/em><\/a> <\/em>(2022), which simply applies excessive detail to a bare fact known by all (that a Russian missile struck the Kyiv TV tower). The blatant attack can hardly be called a conspiracy, and causality is far from occulted by the aggressors \u2014 in fact, Forensic Architecture\u2019s conclusion seems to largely coincide with Russia\u2019s official statements (the strikes were meant to knock out communication systems). Activist tactics developed to deal with dirty wars and atrocities crafted for plausible deniability somehow come up empty-handed when a state conducts a war of aggression with outright genocidal aims.[3]<\/sup> In such cases, artists find more truth in the ambiguity of war than in the concrete accusations. Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei\u2019s recent piece The Wanderer<\/em><\/a> (2022) finds the artists posing themselves as mangled Russian casualties, physically contorted in their violent ends. These images of death need no evidence or discovery \u2014 their randomness is both explainable and arbitrary (and likely sourced from one of the many grisly Telegram feeds the war has birthed).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While this brand of snuff may captivate both us and the artists working to articulate the emotional truths of this moment, our aesthetic impulses still betray us. The \u201cbetter\u201d the image of war, the more we wish that that image had never had occasion to exist. In some sense the banal brings us to a more poignant mode of horror than the exceptional. The cutting honesty of Oleksandr Halishchuk\u2019s drawing untitled<\/em><\/a> <\/em>(2022) is scrawled in school-desk-carving hand: \u201c\u042f \u0411\u041e\u042e\u0421\u042c \u042f \u0422\u0420\u0423\u0421 \u042f \u0422\u0423\u0422\u201d [I\u2019m scared I\u2019m a coward I\u2019m here], and speaks of a gnawing fear that is absent from the perfect media images of explosions. And yet, these fears \u2014 raw or aestheticized, unprocessed or doctored, illegible or illustrative, detailed or obscured, pixelated or hi-res \u2014 flow together through the confluence of curated social media channels. We submit to this curation wildly and desperately, because we have no choice, and because wild desperation itself is sometimes the most sane reaction to our circumstances. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

AIR ALARM CAMERA ROLL is an excerpt from the war\u2019s curation as it cuts across time and space. The project documents the coincidence of my phone\u2019s camera roll with alerts from a Telegram channel devoted to air raid sirens in Lviv, Ukraine. The piece starts from the moment of the first attack on February 24, 2022 and goes comprehensively up until 27 March, 2022. The choices of periodization and location are personal, related to my own circumstances at the time and those of my loved ones, but I could have chosen any period or city since the Russian military set foot in Ukraine for its full-scale invasion. Sirens are still heard regularly across the country, likely somewhere in the moment you read this. Artists in Ukraine work under these conditions, and many have become inured to them, silencing the siren app on their phone with a deftly automatic gesture and going on with their day. For me the data supporting this experience of anxiety is not meaningless, but it is also not a detective story. The crime is known, the intent is stated. The only question is when and where. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The moments shown are not pictures of crucial evidence, or aesthetically spectacular violence, or even useful context for a grand narrative. In most cases they are not even moments of great personal significance. The potential air strikes and rocket attacks against Lviv that trigger the air alarms for the region have failed to find a compelling curatorial thread. Instead there are simply images of Telegram chats, artist friends, a protest, selfies, my partner\u2019s grandmother having breakfast in Warsaw after fleeing Donbas, a supermarket queue, a friend\u2019s dog, documents for crossing the border in a borrowed van, trips with humanitarian aid \u2014 but also: an air strike. And another one. A smiling selfie sent to someone without knowing a missile had just struck nearby, in her neighborhood in Lviv. All true, all arbitrary, and all endless \u2014 for now. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/details><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n