“Book of the Dead”

About

The “Book of the Dead” is a cultural documentary artefact, a rethinking of the artistic experience. It is possible that in the future, this artefact will become anthropological material for studying the confrontation of ideologies at the expense of civilians of Ukraine. The aim of the project is to translate the experience of a morgue volunteer into a holistic statement in the language of art – to make the horrible occurrences real on an emotional level, to provoke reflections outside of geopolitics and propaganda. The creator of the project is the artist Alexander Krolikowski, who worked for three and a half weeks after the liberation of Kyiv as a volunteer in the morgue of Vyshgorod, where the tortured bodies of innocent victims of Russian aggression were taken care of. According to the latest estimates, 1290 residents of the Kyiv region were deliberately killed by the Russian occupiers. From the author: "The Book of the Dead" is a synthesis of instant photography during volunteer work with the bodies of the dead civilians of Bucha, poetic instant photography, and my own memories of meeting death. "Book of the Dead" is a metamodern iconography of one of the most important events in human’s life - Death, through the prism of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Death is an event that created or destroyed meaning for all previous generations of people. And each generation of artists created a portrait of their era, describing the attitude toward death. The memory of the dead is not needed by the dead themselves, we, the living, need it to draw conclusions and learn to value our own lives and the lives of others.” By support of Goethe Institute and GISELA - Freier Kunstraum Lichtenberg