Sergiy Petlyuk / / Сергій Петлюк

Limit of Comprehension

2015

Video installation
Videos. Military uniforms. Projectors, media players, speakers. Dimensions variable


When there is a war in a foreign country you do not feel compelled to understand it deeper, to bear it in mind, or try to rationalize it… to bring it closer to your emotional and bodily experiences. We perceive wars of others rationally. However, when a war starts at home you must face its inhumanity and absurdity all the time, you must imagine your practical future, you must rethink your close past. The all-pervasive violence of the war becomes a part of your naked immediate life. In an attempt to save yourself from it, you try to analyze the war and find your distance to it like a treatment for the disease. Within a short time, you realize that more questions without unambiguous answers arise, or they do not even have one. The number of such questions grows with the number of the killed and crippled, those made to flee and homeless. And one day, you will feel that the questions without answers will have reached the critical mass that leads to a certain limit… the limit of comprehending the incomprehension. For a while, each of us faces a personal challenge, a choice – to get used to the new systemic violence, its rational human madness, or to find your own understanding of the feeling that will not let you forget or escape even at the limit of comprehension...

Videos of nude people are projected on the military uniforms scattered all over the gallery. People talk to each other, although their dialogues consist of merely proclaiming chess moves.