Mnemosyne by Yelena Yemchuk is the second part of an exhibition presented in collaboration between Kolektiv Cité Radieuse and The Naked Room, with the generous support of the Institut Français in Ukraine. The first part, Ithaca, was shown in Marseille in July–August this year.
Yemchuk describes herself as a multimedia artist who has long worked with film and photography, and came to painting later. Although she has lived in the United States since the age of eleven, Yelena identifies as a Ukrainian artist, and Mnemosyne marks a significant return: despite exhibiting widely, she has never before had a show in Ukraine.
The project grew out of Yemchuk’s return to Kyiv last August—her first visit in four years, the longest she had been away since leaving as a child. Yelena stopped by The Naked Room, and some time later received an invitation proposing a show that initially focused on documenting that trip and her new series Minerva. As conversations progressed and Yelena began scanning negatives from the 1990s to the early 2000s, the concept expanded to include this unseen material alongside recently created collages from her own archival photographs.
Her style is distinguished by an aesthetic that combines the past and the present in a space-time of dreams, nostalgia and magic. “I work from memory and dreams, from the gap I missed—the years between eleven and twenty when I couldn’t come back. This is the chunk of my life when I had no contact with what was happening in Ukraine at the time,” comments Yelena. “All we have are our memories and our photographs, and the photographs kind of trigger our memories.”
After moving to the US, Yemchuk encountered reductive stereotypes of ‘Soviet women’—from unattractive and scary to hypersexualised. In response, her portraits draw on archetypes she has seen in her home country—strong, funny, and beautiful in every way. Today, Yelena Yemchuk is one of the most renowned Ukrainian artists, whose work integrates Ukrainian identity into the global cultural context.
“We have been familiar with Yelena’s iconic series ‘Odesa’ and ‘Hydropark’ through her photobooks, but we have never seen her work presented as an exhibition in Ukraine. This is a remarkable gap for the Ukrainian art scene, given the scope and profoundness of her oeuvre. When thinking about the show for The Naked Room (which has a pretty limited space), we ultimately agreed to start ‘from the beginning’ and focus on Yelena’s street photography made on her earliest visits to Ukraine in the mid-1990s through the early 2000s. Her vast archive from the time—unlike contemporary staged and thoroughly composed images—is raw, running, at times unsharp. Yet it is already there where Yelena’s principle subject sets in—a persona of a very special enigma that feels both very real and familiar as well as fictional and somewhat mythic. In Mnemosyne, we attempt to reveal this foundation of Yelena’s visual language, which is deeply rooted in her reminiscence of a Ukrainian childhood,” comment Maria Lanko and Lizaveta German.
