.jpg "The dreamlike touch of Yelena Yemchuk on show in New York")
Until April 16, 2023, The Ukrainian Museum in New York hosts a large-scale exhibition of world-renowned artist Yelena Yemchuk. Born in Kyiv and raised in the United States, Yelena developed a peculiar aesthetic and imaginative world where the surreal dimension merges with reality.
In particular, the show features the project Odesa, dedicated to the city on the Black Sea, and Malanka, a new short film shot in the Carpathian Mountains.
The first project is displayed through large-size pictures depicting the inhabitants of what is seen
by the author as “the place of freedom during Soviet times,” with a special attention on sixteen and seventeen-year-old boys and girls at the Odesa Military Academy. The portraits are accompanied by environmental images that render the idea of a city full of contradiction, but precisely because of this, thoroughly enchanting.
For the second project, Malanka, screened for the first time in this exhibition, Yelena filmed a fictional story in the framework of a pagan-rooted festival, creating a hypnotic film where the atmosphere of the rural countryside clashes with the elusive dimension of time and space. Following her typical practice, the artist shapes a dreamlike narrative made of both surreal touches and familiar elements drawn mainly by her childhood.
We talked with Yelena Yemchuk to learn more about the exhibition and her approach to image-making.
Your practice often moves between photography and film-making. Could you tell me more about your relationship with these two media?
My film infatuation started very early. I saw Blue Velvet when I was 15 and that was that, it blew my mind. In art school, I had a very good teacher. In our composition class we watched Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky and Maya Deren films.I think these films were a big part of my inspiration as a young artist. The same year, I discovered Federico Fellini. His vision is so unique and so close to the way I saw things. It made me believe that I could make art that was coming directly from my dreams, memories and my subconscious. It was a very exciting time, and all these inspirations shaped the way I took photographs.
Since my early school years, I paid a lot of attention to framing and composition. I wanted the photographs to feel like they were a part of bigger stories. I always saw things through a cinematic point of view.
The first movie I made was in 1994 with my boyfriend at the time, Jahmin, and it was called El Circo de Bizarre Mundo. I was really drawn to the aesthetic of Spanish cinematography. We were really into data and reading all the surrealist books and watching Alejandro Jodorowsky films. We made this strange movie about the circus, two-headed creatures and all this fantasy stuff. It was one of the best experiences I ever had. Because when you’re kids and you’re making college films, you’re making the costumes, you’re doing the casting, you’re finding the locations. I was shooting, he was producing, and we shot with a Super 8. It was so fun. And that was my first step into actually having the images move. I really fell in love with it. But for whatever reason, life took me in a different path and I continued still photography. But film was something that was always in the back of my mind. But the problem with film is the finance. We were kids and didn’t have much money, so it took us a while before we made another film. I’ve always liked the experimental part of it—the films that were more like art pieces.
When working with films, where do you take inspiration from? How is your creative process with film compared to photography?
My ideas usually come from the visual things around me. Memories and dreams. I’m not a great writer so ideas are usually written on pieces of paper mostly abstract and have a lot of room for experimentation. Usually the idea stems from a painting I saw or a dream that I had. And then if it’s very strong and something that keeps at me, I’ll go back to it and start developing it. Then I feel like, okay, I have to figure out how to make this. The first kind of grown-up film that I made was about 12 years ago. It was called El Monte and stars Natasa V. It’s really interesting because it came from a dream. This woman was in my dream looking for her husband, looking for a man that was her husband or her boyfriend that went missing. And then all these visuals came from not just one dream, but a bunch of dreams. She’s kind of lost. She walks into a room and there’s all these characters in this room and I had this vision of this woman singing. This film was such an amazing experience for me because I ended up doing all the things I did when I was a kid—creating the set, the costumes, and these characters, and telling a story that was bigger than just a series of photographs was so exciting. And honestly, at that point, I was like, that’s all I want, I just want to make my strange films.
A still from Malanka © Yelena Yemchuk. Courtesy of the artist
Can you tell me more about Malanka, the film you’re showing in New York? How was the idea born?
When I was doing the Odesa project, I met this incredible girl, Anya, and we really had an immediate creative connection. I was taking her portrait for the Odesa book and I asked if I could photograph her for a different project I was working on at the time, called Mabel, Betty & Bette.
I showed her some images from the project and she looked at me, looked at the photographs and said, “I’m the girl”. So, we shot for that and when I came back to New York, I started thinking about going back to Odesa and shooting her as all the three characters for the film. We did that in 2018 and it was such an amazing experience. With the best Ukrainian cast and crew in great locations. Odessa is the best city in the world, making this film was just such an amazing experience. In 2019, I went to Western Ukraine to take photographs during the Malanka Festival in a small village on the border of Romania. It was a very wild trip, a bit scary at times and very complicated to get to. You felt like you were completely outside of any kind of western influence. I really felt like a stranger in a strange land. I went with two girlfriends and it was a bit last minute and not very thought out. We had no place to stay. It was an hour outside of the nearest town and we ended up sleeping in a tuberculosis sanitarium. The whole thing felt like a movie—people in costumes in this strange little village where it’s 20 below zero Everything seemed like a dream. It was wild, just wild. And I thought, I’m going to come back here next year and film a movie. So, hence the Malanka film. I knew I wanted to make a trilogy with Anya so I wrote part two and we shot it there the following year. Working together with Anya has opened up a mirror to go back to my childhood and all my fascination with identity. And she’s become this incredible portal into that world.And in that world that lives in my imagination. We went to western Ukraine, a little bit more organized this time, and we made Malanka there, which is part science fiction and part emotional mystery. The project also includes photographs that will be a book coming out next spring with Edition Patrick Frey.
Where does the title of the film come from?
That’s what they call the festival. It’s a pagan holiday that’s like the Greek version of Persephone. It started in Ukraine about 200 years ago. It’s celebrated on New Year’s Eve on January 13th. The tale is that the devil kidnaps Mother Earth’s daughter, Spring. He takes her into the underworld and then the people and animals dance, sing and stomp until the Devil releases Malanka from the underworld and Spring begins, so I called the film Malanka.
Speaking of the exhibition—how did the two projects, Odesa and Malanka, dialogue between each other?
Well, it was an interesting thing because I initially wouldn’t have done that. It wasn’t my idea, but it worked. The curator and the director of the Ukrainian Museum, Peter Doroshenko, just started there in the fall this year. I worked with him on another project at the Dallas Contemporary museum where I had Mabel, Betty & Bette shown there three years ago. I had a big installation of the photographs from that project and showed the film there as well. So when he asked me to do the exhibit with the Odesa project at the Ukrainian Museum, he also mentioned showing the Malanka film. It was never shown before, so it was a nice opportunity to show two completely different projects made in Ukraine. And it worked together nicely, because it’s such a great space and such a beautiful museum!
It’s really unique when you are walking through the exhibit and you hear the sound from another room, while you are looking at the photographs. There is something very emotional that happens because the sound is so great. I had the pleasure to work with the wonderful Dean Hurley on this. You really enter this immersive world and it balances each other out. The sound is so immersive with the images because you’re not used to looking at photographs with sound unless you’re listening to an audio track that walks you through the exhibit.
What role do exhibitions play in your practice compared to books, in terms of reaching an audience in a physical space?
It’s interesting because I’ve always been a book person. I love making books. The process of creating a book is probably one of my favorite things. I collect books. I collect art books, I collect photo books. I can’t walk into a bookstore without going crazy and buying as many books as I can get my hands on. When I come back from Europe, I have to get a new suitcase. Or if there’s a book fair, I’m so excited to go. So, I love the idea of the physical aspect of touching something, holding it, being with it and coming back to it. But that said, when I go to exhibitions that are powerful and that are well curated, it’s such an amazing experience because you’re integrated into it, it’s a physical experience. You’re there and you can stand with it, you can walk away from it, you can come back to it. If the exhibit is great, you walk out of there feeling connected to the experience. It’s one thing to see something on a piece of paper, it’s another thing to actually stand in front of the real piece of art. I find this especially true with painting. Because of the texture, the layering, the size–you have no idea what it is when you’re looking at it. With photography, I find it less ‘wow’ because the photographic process, to me, kind of works on paper. For this exhibition, I ended up doing 15 huge, almost poster size images. Some of them are completely different from the book because you start seeing all the details and all the little things in the image that you didn’t see when it was small. It’s incredible how impressive it looks. I’ve shown Odesa before, but when we started printing for this exhibition, seeing the large prints and choosing the ones that we ended up with was so wonderful. It’s such a cool thing to be so face-to-face with the characters. Things really change when you see them in such big dimensions. And the reaction of viewers was amazing.
© Yelena Yemchuk. Courtesy of the Artist and The Ukrainian Museum, New York
You often mention your childhood as a source of inspiration. What role does your childhood play in your practice?
I think the older I get, the more I realize how important it is. Which is so strange, because you think about that time in your life, and it’s kind of vague. It’s almost like dreaming. But I find that I keep going back to specific memories from my childhood. There are certain moments that bring you back to a place of that innocence and wonder that you had as a kid. You’re so open, so excited and so confused about everything at the same time. Our dreams go into your reality, and you’re like a floating sponge of energy. I had such a wonderful childhood in Ukraine, I spent a lot of it with my grandmother and cousin. I spent all my vacations and weekends with these two magical creatures. And my grandmother was the woman that just took me everywhere, and we spent a lot of time in nature, it was just this kind of love, this overwhelming love. I feel like every Ukranian I know has that special bond with their grandmother. I don’t know what it is, but it’s like this old soul character that would read to me, look at art books together and go wander in the forest. My cousin was 9 years older than me, an artist and a musician, but we were hanging out like we were the same age.was really beautiful. I think that the two of them developed my fantasy and my ability to create and come up with magical ideas. So when my parents and I came to the States, I had that cut off from me, a full-on trauma. When I started realizing that I was an artist and I needed to express myself, I subconsciously went back to that time, to this place of healing, and in a weird way, a place where I felt secure and safe, the place of magic. So I think there’s a lot of fantasy, humor and magic in my work because I keep going back to that place, which is also ‘surreal’ in a sense. And that’s where things get blurred…there is where the line is blurry between fantasy and reality.
This thin balance between reality and fantasy is then mirrored in your work? How do you manage to keep this thin balance?
I love this space between dreams and reality. I always go back there or maybe it’s just where I exist. Even with more of my documentary work, when I am shooting in a city on the streets with no set-ups of any kind, I still find that thing that is a bit absurd and lives out of our everyday reality. It really lives everywhere, you just have to see it. It’s like in the Odesa project, the city is like a floating land of dreams and reality and I was drawn to it. Like a person’s face pulls you in, or like a flower, the way it’s lying in the grass intrigues you. And I think, in that case, whatever you’re attracted to, you try to show it through your eyes. It’s hard to explain because it becomes your version of something. Your interpretation. If somebody was here next to me and they took the same picture, they would take a completely different picture, or they wouldn’t take this picture at all. I think it’s an individual perspective. It’s whatever captivates you. Films are a great way to create a completely different reality, you can really take one into your world. And then there is painting, where I can create exactly what I want out of my imagination. Then anything is possible. No rules at all.
Given your long-lasting experience as an artist, what would you recommend to image-makers that are entering the world of photography today?
Well, when I started taking pictures and decided to become a photographer, it was not a very popular thing to do. Not at all, actually. I was really interested in photography and felt like it was a great way for me to express my inner world, it was very instinctual. My advice is, if you think that it’s like being a rock star or something, it’s really not. Right now, there’s so many photographers, and I think you have to be very passionate about this art form. You have to have an individual way of seeing things. The difference between a good picture and a picture that touches somebody is very big. In our world now we’re overwhelmed with photography—we see it left and right. Especially with Instagram. It’s oversaturated. Don’t get too caught up in trying to fit into a box or take pictures like the people that are popular. I think my overall advice would be, if you’re really passionate and have a story to tell, go with it. Just do your own thing.
