“Ukraine. Conspirology” 2014

In whose hands is Ukraine? Who rules her? Who holds the power? Why was this fratricidal war unleashed, and by whom?

In the time of trouble the average man tends to blame everything on some secret forces: a Masonic plot, a Jewish conspiracy, the bloody hand of the CIA… Those to blame would be Putin with his Jewish roots, or Obama the Mason, or fascist Poroshenko, or the secret communist Timoshenko. This project is based on paradoxical and ironical thoughts about the average man’s blaming patterns. Conspirology appears to be a somewhat fantastic phenomenon that has reached an especially large scale today, in the age of Post-Modernism. Post-Modernism gravitates towards extravagant and disproportionate models, towards absurdity and multi-layering of concepts. This is exactly where the Conspirology theory derives its charming chaos and fascinating delirium from.

These images utilize Conspirological texts from anti-Semitic and fascist-oriented websites. There, the recent events in Ukraine are treated as an American or a Zionist conspiracy against Russia, as a Masonic secret plot dating back to Stalin’s times. The graphical component includes all kinds of Masonic symbols which are compared with the symbols related to Fascism, Communism and Ukrainian Nationalism. The decoding of “The Conspiracy Theory” is illustrated by an array of geometrical elements.

Every piece is numbered and titled “Protocol #…” (a reference to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”). The Masonic signs are interlaced with cliché portraits of historic and political figures. Here we see Hitler and Lenin, Che Guevara and Mao, Kaddafi and Kim Ir Sen, Brezhnev, Mussolini, Marx, and (surely) the likenesses of Obama, Putin, Yanukovych and Timoshenko. The photographs represent the Apocalypses itself: – the end of the sinful world. Generally speaking, the works illustrate the paranoid character of the theories described above.

“Ukraine. Conspirology.” is an invitation to play the game of hypothetical puzzles, of eccentric conjectures, of absurd suspicions – the game with our own confusion of tastes and ideas.