Oksana Chepelyk

Here is my Story with my answers on your questions: – What is your experience of the pandemic year? Of course a lot of plans were discontinued.

My exhibitions: Malta Robotics Olympiad and “City Code” in Valletta were cancelled and “Art+Feminism 2020” was in lockdown. Luckily, “Art+Feminism 2020” in Spazju Kreattiv in Malta were reopened and running until 23rd of August 2020. I’m speaking about the international exhibitions; two of them in March-April 2020 were cancelled.

Another exhibition “Environment of Existence. Manifesto” in Kyiv also was canceled. We had an opening and two weeks of running exhibition and then quarantine happened. And a lot of plans concerning summer and autumn exhibitions also were postponed due to the pandemic. Happily, the pandemic has provoked an online exhibition “60 Days of Lockdown” at Luxelakes · A4 Museum in Chengdu, China. You could watch my interview concerning pandemic experience here: https://vimeo.com/541099568.

Pandemic provoked a hunger of public exhibitions and boom of shows between the lockdowns. Unfortunately, my 5 international art residencies in 2020 were canceled. My “Collider” project had to be implemented at the art residency of ZK/U – the Center for Art and Urban Studies in Berlin, but due to the pandemic it was reformatted into online “VR Collider” project on Mozilla Hubs with the theme “cities and borders”.

– How do you work during the lockdowns? New inspiration is s painting right here in my room, because I usually work with spatial structures and moving imagery mapping on this spatial structure as a screen. So, I switched to another media – to painting in order to do the same with painting inside of my studio, or apartment. During this period because some of the exhibitions abroad and some exhibitions inside of my country, inside of Ukraine, were cancelled and I switched to the painting – this kind of new inspiration and new works for my personal exhibition at the Korsaks’ Museum of Ukrainian Contemporary Art in Lutsk in February-March 2021.

I also had to go back to digital art, exploring VR for Artefact Chornobyl’ + MADATAC International Festival of a Contemporary Audio-Visual & New Media Art, Madrid, Spain and for my “VR Collider” project on Mozilla Hubs. – Does the pandemic influence your artistic practice?

My jump into VR technic was a big pandemic influence on my artistic practice.

I would not say that I’ve been rethinking the sense of whole art, because my projects, as I already mentioned, that I’m working with spatial structure with moving imagery, but in in my recent project that actually was exhibited in Taiwan in 2018 with the title “Meta-Physical Time-Space”, been presented as such spatial structure, the topic was a concerning the consciousness and quantum physics, problematizing the relationship between human being and our planet.

The activity of human being is damaging to our planet. In this piece I’ve been collaborating with German artist Rico Graupner, who works with life species incorporating sound of life species into the computer program producing the music. So, this an idea about life on our planet, which is under question the continuity of life and the planet as well, because human being is leading so devastating and damaging activity right now.

So, I had all those questions and now during the quarantine I considered it as another kind of warning for the humanity to rethink our activity, our value probably to stop damaging our planet.

This is my answer on your question. And I’m happy to share some of my creations with people, with another artists, or wider audience. In my room there is the painting approaching my media art “Collider” project, which addresses the public spaces and quantum physics. The public spaces, where happened some events, which shape our life. And now I’m trying to paint this public space evolving in this kind of Collider, but also you can probably see in these circles the shape, the tail of dragon. I know in Chinese culture dragon is a sign of luck for people, in European culture it can represent kind of evil, but my painting refers mainly to the foresight. In ancient Greek mythology, during the invasion of Troy, we had the character of Cassandra and Laocoon. Do you remember the famous sculpture “Laocoon and His Sons” fighting big snakes? Because Laocoon also warned the people of Troy, as Cassandra did, not to take the giant Greek horse, which now has name the “Trojan Horse” with them to the city. But the gods, who wanted to destroy Troy, have sent two snakes to kill Laocoon, who was trying to warn the Trojans.

So, I reflect this idea of prevention, and what is happening now with the pandemic is also for us a kind of attempt to warn humanity, to warn people in order to rethink our activities and our values. And my “VR Collider” is an architectural structure consisting of 4 platforms, which hang like a space station in the orbit of the planet Earth, capturing and decoding the vibrations of our time.

Video “GAIA” refers through gender study to the Gaia hypothesis, also known as Gaia theory or Gaia principle, proposing that all organisms and their inorganic surroundings on Earth are closely integrated to form a single and self-regulating complex system, maintaining the conditions for life on the planet. The Gaia hypothesis, named after goddess of the Earths at ancient Greek mythology, was formulated by the environmentalist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. Already in the twentieth century, Vladimir Vernadsky developed theory of the Earth’s development that is now one of the foundations of Ecology. During the 1920s he published works, arguing that living organisms could reshape the planets as surely as any physical force, followed by noosphere concept.

“Genesis”, Oksana Chepelyk, VR project on Mozilla Hubs, 2020.

The focus of VR “Genesis” project is on the city of Pripyat, which 35 years ago was abandoned and become to be part of the Chornobyl Exclusion zone. The Chernobyl catastrophe served as an impulse for the establishment of the self-consciousness of the people and, in fact, the formation of the nation. The project develops pivotal theme of the nation’s genetic fund, appealing to the nature of the reproductive system, with the necessary involvement of historical retrospection, referring to the Chernobyl disaster, our present and corresponding future deformation. It demonstrates a space with walls-screens with 2D and 3D ultrasonic videos of the fetus and the body of a pregnant woman. A balloon with an ultrasound image and a baby is above the head working as real-time birth rate monitoring in Ukraine; it changes approximately every 1,5 minutes. Every subsequent birth echoes with a powerful audio splash obtained during an ultrasound scan of human artery.

Ultrasound is a kind of document about the “inner” life of the baby before birth, where medical evidence and concern for the preservation of life, in which life is studied as an object, area of risk andresponsibility, are intertwined. The project can be seen as a message concerning the threat to life on Earth. According to Akile Bonito Oliva, “Genesis” disseminates a disturbance and starts to transmit the impulses to atrophic center of viewer’s perception, referring to his/her sensitivity. It should help to realize the limited man impact on the radiation, instead, to provoke the deepening of human memory. The shape of the balloon for the installation was chosen not by chance – the binary opposition of micro-macro is essential, when a video on a balloon shows an image of a baby in ultrasonic rays, transforming a Bio Cell into a Human Planet.

VR “Genesis” was made within Artefact Chornobyl+MADATAC project with participation of Denis Gumynyuk, Mult VR. https://youtu.be/WnGgQ_HuFcY – from 5:12 min. a short video tour.

https://hubs.mozilla.com/scenes/m98G5hq