Burkhard von Harder // Anonymous

“Ukraine is a country of lost archives” – Oksana Zabuzhko, writer (2013)

“In truth Ukraine is in a state of war not with Russia but with the undead corpse of the USSR.” – Citizen from Vinnytsia, 2014

In the summer of 2010 German photographer and artist Burkhard von Harder traveled to central Ukraine (Volhynia-Podolia) for research when making a chance find in the attic of a deserted building in the city of Vinnytsia. At that time, it was not apparent that the scattered negative strips were remnants of a photo-archive from Soviet times taken by anonymous photo journalists of the regional communist daily newspaper covering the municipality and province.

An official permission of the regional art museum enabled the transfer of the material to Germany, followed by a lengthy cleaning and scanning process, before the found footage could be seriously looked at for the first time.

Subsequently, a number of PoD publications were produced and presented at international art-book-fairs. In the summer of 2013, the project was the headliner of the VIZII Festival in Kyiv (FIRST FESTIVAL OF VISUAL CULTURE KYIV). In 2014, v.H. returned to Vinnytsia once again to conduct interviews with protagonists from the archive who could be identified and traced and who would talk about their lives in the soviet era and the years of transition to independence. The events surrounding Maidan led to the abandonment of the recordings.

The motifs of the prints included in the show are based on negatives whose everyday motifs display additional visual impact due to chemical processes (solarisations) and mechanical injuries (scratches).

From today’s perspective these images seem to have acquired new meaning through a 20-year incubation period in the attic, as if such a period had been necessary to make visible silent references that wanted to point eloquently to the future.

Thanks to some viable connections parts from the sales (of the imagery of this abandoned archive) will be in direct support of the Ukrainian Defense.