Julia Beliaeva: First We Take Manhattan Then We Take Berlin

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Her porcelain sculptures are modelled using 3D scans and are still cast in the Kyiv Experimental Porcelain Factory, which is considered formative for Ukrainian and Soviet applied arts; painting techniques were used there on porcelain that are now listed as UNESCO World Heritage. The factory has been officially closed for several years now, the fact that Julia's works are being produced there is an exception, and in today's wartime circumstances even more noteworthy. Several hundred porcelain bullets were cast for the upcoming exhibition.

Of course, this exhibition reflects on the current situation, but it is important to note that it was already planned for 2021, but was prevented by the pandemic. The war has acutely changed the circumstances, influenced and sharpened the conception and content.

Julia fights with her own weapons, and not only since now. Her first bullets were cast in 2015, when Crimea was annexed by Russia and the conflict, which at that time was yet not called a war, began in Eastern Ukraine. Porcelain as material - extremely fragile, but also particularly hard - takes on a special symbolic power and ambivalence in this work. Now Julia's arsenal is growing: 800 bullets were made specifically for the exhibition in Germany. They are roughly in size of real machine gun ammunition, but they are also about the same size as the porcelain figurines that the Kyiv Porcelain Factory produced in the 1950s-1980s which could be found on every sideboard.

The directness of the weapon sculpture is replaced with a somewhat more complex range of themes in the video installation. The work is conceived as a so-called "digital porcelain", a 3D model for a multi-part sculpture that is shown from different perspectives in a tracking shot until the complete scenery finally opens up: young people on skateboards at the Soviet obelisk honouring the Hero City Kyiv, a well-known spot in the capital. "Hero City" was awarded as an honorary title in the Soviet Union to 12 cities for heroic defence in WW2. The sacralisation of WW2 was part of the doctrine of the Soviet Union, and is still used in today's Russia as leverage against ex-Soviet states to impose shared history and Russian domination. Detachment from this has been an important issue in Ukraine since the 1990s. Julia tackles it step by step in this work. She replaces, for example, the Russian inscriptions on the monument with Ukrainian. But there is more to emancipation, including a deconstruction of the sanctity of some symbols. Bringing skaters into play here was a clever move.

Skating is a sport that is very individual, does not accept authority, resists all drill and canons, and sets itself apart from social norms. Without intentionally declaring it, the skating community in Kyiv has made an effective contribution to dismantling totalitarian symbolism in a very natural way by appropriating Soviet monuments in the 1990s. Skate parks did not exist at that time, but the monuments with their mirror-smooth marble and granite surfaces with many steps offer slick surfaces and exciting obstacles. Thus, places that used to be surrounded by a pathetic devotional atmosphere became meeting places for a freedom-loving subculture. Use through skating also means wearing out. According to the motto "skate and destroy", one appropriates the environment through its wear and tear, from which, however, one is not spared oneself. Destruction is not an end in itself here, but a manifestation of being alive. The fact that every life leaves traces is part of the normality that such memorial sites definitely lack.

The artist calls her work "Heroes of the City" and thus also counters the heroic canon of representation. Images of people in the Soviet monument tradition are characterised by martial, monumental physicality and interchangeable physiognomy. Julia`s art incorporates an interesting stylistic balancing act: she works close to Soviet modernism or the so-called "severe style", which is characterised by elegant, austere reduction. However, she avoids the emphatically monumental, the bodies are athletic and wiry, the posture gives everything: from nonchalance to graceful tension – it is about characters, not muscular masses. Porcelain as the potential material of the "Heores" is a complete contrast to the usual heroic monuments made of stone and metal. It makes everything appear more delicate. Skaters made of porcelain are a contradiction that picks up on the defiance and self-irony of this community. Accepting one's own fragility is liberating and life-affirming.

Moreover, skateboarding positions itself as a peacemaking movement that values and promotes community and individual expression – comparable to art. Skate legend Titus Dittmann teaches young people to skate in crisis areas like Afghanistan: "Kids who skate don't shoot," he says. Peace is currently longed for, and is permanently endangered in Ukraine. The work is set to a soundscape of air-raid sirens. These have been part of everyday life in Kyiv for half a year now, and that is how long people have been defying the aggressor's offensive plans and power monger fantasies. The title of the exhibition alludes to the latter. It is a quotation from a song by Leonard Cohen. The beauty of the song and romanticising rhetoric makes one forget that it actually tells of delusions of terrorism - an artistic experiment on a perfidious mechanism that many aggressors use. In the current war, too. Only fortunately, the aggressor could not make all threats come true.