Comrade Kobzar

HD-video, ‘5

 

The work explores the constructivist period of Ivan Kavaleridze's 1920s work. It was then that Kavaleridze worked on the creation of the first monuments of Taras Shevchenko and "experimental", "installation-associative" films.

The not embodied idea of ​​the cubist mausoleum of Shevchenko in Kaniv, the first in history full-figure monuments to the "kobzar" in Romny and Poltava, the lost constructivist monument of the poet in Sumy are images of the non-canonical constructivist Shevchenko, who was left on the periphery of Ukrainian cultural memory, in the shadow of a socialist realistic sorrowful Shevchenko "wrestler" or pathetic folklore Shevchenko "father".

 

Drawing attention to the motifs of materiality, nonlinearity, rhythm, non-anthropomorphism, which are important for constructivism, we attempt, on the example of Shevchenko by Kavaleridze, to reveal the conflict between the plot and form, real and mythologized in the image of Shevchenko, and in (auto)biography of Kavaleridze by himself.