07.04.2017 19:00
“I am 5 years old. It’s raining, a walnut branch taps against the windowpanes. It’s night.
Space and moving within it becomes a dream.
And they gather. Thoughts. They exist in my head even when I forget about them.”
[Theses of Volodymyr Topiy, email from 29.03.2017]
“I don’t know,” Volodymyr Topiy answers me when I ask what he would like to do at the Marta Shefter Gallery. And in his mouth, it sounds disarmingly sincere. It carries an authenticity and almost childlike not-knowing. We fall silent, cutting off the conversation mid-sentence. He doesn’t even need to add – “I’m very afraid of this, but I want to do it” – because I already know it intuitively.
Volodymyr Topiy is an unusual performer. Outside of performance art, his primary focus is painting. He paints—or perhaps, more accurately, as the saying goes (though this is not entirely correct, as it stems from a mistranslation)—writes icons. He comes from Lviv, Ukraine, a mythical, though now somewhat familiar East, so perhaps it’s not entirely surprising. From a mental outpost of Asia, which Zbigniew Warpechowski dedicated his series of performances to. Asia, whose dramaturgy is rooted in repetition and the collage of redundancy, in poor decorations that are always some variation on the theme of suppressed individuality, juxtaposed with seemingly, even deliberately staged, everyday actions.
And although Topiy knows this world well and shares with Warpechowski the experience of spiritual and political oppression, their perspectives do not align; they may only intersect. He sees that Asia—that metaphor reflecting life within a hopeless system—differently. With nostalgia for the times of childhood, only later, from the distance of time, recognizing the symptoms of illness.
