Oksana Kazmina
Screen and Visual Artist
Oksana Kazmina is a Ukrainian documentary film maker, media artist, and performer.
Oksana graduated from the Faculty of Journalism at Ivan Franko Lviv National University, the Faculty of TV-Directing at Karpenko-Kary Kyiv National Theater, Film and Television University, and Moving Academy for Performing Arts - Amsterdam. Oksana was also a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Wesleyan University, USA, 2016. Now she is an MFA candidate at Syracuse University, USA.
Just before full scale invasion of Ukraine, Oksana had started a series of performance lectures on the contemporary history of Ukraine and a series of bio-dairies “Dead/ly landscapes or I myself should become all places I loved.” This performance series navigates such concepts as “peripheries,” “outskirts,” “side walks,” “walking,” “memory,” and “personal archives.” “Dead/ly landscapes…” is a bio-art project, which uses vaginal flora bacterias grown on petri dishes as the material for the processing of disruption and fragmentation of the body and space due to the war.
Diary Poster, 2022
June 23, 2022
Tonight I woke to air raid sirens. I decided to masturbate.
Digging, 2022
Performance (May, 2022, Syracuse, USA)
Photo documentation by Anshul Roy
In Ukrainian city of Mariupol, a lot of graves are on playgrounds. It is happening in 2022.
In Syracuse - the earth is clay and full of stones. While digging, I tried to remember what kind of land is beneath the playgrounds of Mariupol. I also thought that diggers are the new heroes of our time. Digging, digging, digging--graves, trenches, shelters. The graves are part of our new landscapes in Ukraine, which, as of now, I have only seen in photos. I tried to dig a grave big enough for my own body. I tried to dig as fast as possible, imagining that it was the only time I had to bury a loved one before the next shelling. I think people dug graves while shelling was going on.
I thought about how I would decide what materials to use for the tombstone: what I would write the text on and what I would write in the text. What is better - a cross made of a piece of plinth and parquet or a branch of a tree and a piece of plastic? This gesture is part of my project "Digging and Burning", which, more broadly, is part of my attempt to adapt my body to the new reality. A new reality in which human bodies (not all, but those that the entire civilized world has agreed are an acceptable price for peace and security) lose value, cease to be something worth saving at all costs, and, in fact, cease to be human bodies, turn into material. The world can watch death in real time, death is streamed online. In this new reality, I am not capable of theorizing or subtle conceptualizations. There is nothing logical in graves on children's playgrounds, or, rather, the bodies in these memorials have their own sick logic. According to this sick logic, Ukrainian bodies are the material that feeds the "peace and security" machine. My body is against such peace and security.
Let there be graves in the playgrounds of the entire "civilized" world; let every civilized citizen, whose life still has value, try to dig a grave for his loved one and answer the questions: where to dig, if there is shooting is everywhere? How deep to dig? How much more valuable is my own life than a dead human body? What to make a cross from? And where to get flowers if "cross" and "flowers" are concepts from a past life that you no longer have?