Ukrainian photographer Viktor Marushchenko presents some unlikely and juxtaposing views of Donbas coalminers and the lives they lead in the deep and above ground
r Marushchenko, the photographs tell the story of former miners in post-Soviet Donbas. The mines they once worked in are now officially closed, but still miners return to harvest coal to sell at the bazaar. In Donbas, more than 60,000 illegal miners – men, women and adolescents – thus make their living.
Straight away, the photographs impress on you one thing: the coal miners work. They toil. They push, drag, lift, haul, dig and pound. In the mines, soot covers their skin. The camera flash gives a matte sheen to their blackness, and they start to resemble beasts driven underground by a populace no longer able to look at them. When you can see the miners’ eyes, they stare back without pity, looking at you from somewhere on the far side of resignation. The daylight framed by the mine’s entrance is harsh, but also, from inside the oppressiveness of the mine, hopeful.
But outside, the sky is the same blasted gray-white of the snow-smothered landscape, shattered only by the ragged nerve endings of dead tree branches. Leaving the first room of photographs, you sense that there is no solace, no release for the miners.
The second room breaks the spell. Miners throw arms around one another and their faces relax. You couldn’t call it a smile, but their eyes are refocused, the tension that was once there is somehow eased. Outside the mines on a break, they squat in a run-down house, drinking tea and smiling hesitantly, shy in front of the camera. Outside the mines, together, they are human.
Around a corner, the exhibit shocks us with a flash of color. A woman, who in previous photos wore soot and canvas, stands in a dress before a wall-sized picture of an idyllic forest lake. To us, her feminine pose and sensual smile is surreal, out-of-place; but she holds herself without irony, unaware of any dissonance.
The final room of the exhibit paints an even starker contrast, and perhaps even goes too far. Small photographs of the miners pockmark an outlandish fantasy mural of green landscapes and cutesy animals. The lighting, so dim in the rest of the exhibit, is intense, and the result is extravagant and even silly after the simple humanism of the first photographs.
But there’s no denying the beauty of the exhibit, or the power of the dreamscape it creates. The atmosphere is at once bleak and desolate and warm and human – and utterly real.
Dreamland – Donbas
Center for Contemporary Art
2 Skovorody, 238-2446, www.cca.kiev.ua.
Gallery open Tue.-Sun. from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Through April 24.
