Sergiy Petlyuk / / Сергій Петлюк

Direct Influence Zone

2015

4 channel video installation


 

In recent decades, the media has become the main instrument for the production of stereotypes. Through selected content and "correct" messages, it teaches people to think/live/act in a certain way, thus gaining control over public opinion, making things more predictable and manipulating the lives of target groups and entire societies.

The artist places the audience in a situation of "cacophony" of stereotypes; overwhelming the viewer with everyday and very banal beliefs... The work is not so much a direct call to break conventional attitudes towards people and things and to establish an impartial and independent view... but a reflection on very common and yet invisible mechanisms of control - semantic matrices filled with "appropriate" ideas and images.

In collaboration with Ukrainian writer Andriy Bondar, the artist thoroughly researched and gathered via social media the most common stereotypes in Ukrainian society related to politics, culture, gender, religion and everyday life. The actors pronounce the 55 most common of them on four giant screens suspended above the viewer in the enclosed square space of the gallery.