Witnesses of the Pink Radiancy

“For last days, I often wonder what will change when another some third tenant appears in our apartment? One day, I’ll return from a business trip, and I’ll see how he is coming out of the bath and around his head there is a strange pink glow!”

“Tsunami” by Anatoliy Kim.

“Witnesses of the Pink Radiance” is a reflection of two Russian artists in those days when the  “special military operation” was announced in Ukraine. Here is how one of the authors describes his experiences,

“On the twenty-fourth of February, it became difficult for me to breathe. I felt that all the signs of the long-awaited spring seemed to be poisoned. A week before, I had a dream where an elderly, stooping man comes into the house and says in shock, ‘The War! ’ After the twenty-fourth of February I lost sleep for several days.  I began to feel that I was completely frozen from the inside. Of course, life goes on. I go to work, do what I used to do, but now everything is not the same as before. It often feels as if I am crushed down by a huge stone. Drawing has become a way for me to stop fixing my attention on feelings of anxiety and hopelessness of the future. Depicting in sketches the faces of other people with their unique features, you can again feel unity. Experience a sense of uniqueness, the value of everyone’s life.  And at the same time see in everyone a reflection of yourself”.

The word “witnesses” in the title of the project can be understood both as a synonym for “observers” that is those who were present at any event, and as participants in the trial. In a sense that everyone in his life, at least once, in his thoughts has been both an accuser and an acquitted person and a judge. It is worth mentioning, that the rules in some cases prohibit video and photography in courts, so the artists make sketches from the scene. The theme of the ban on photographing the court is also reflected here. It must be said that he drawings do not depict participants in real trials as witnesses but ordinary people, townspeople, contemporaries of the authors of the project.

In the story “Tsunami” the narrator became an unwitting confessor of a man who had experienced a shock from a natural disaster, a regular witness of the echoes of the difficult times that remained in his fate. So he saw a solution for his sad life in the form of the appearance of a neighbor with a strange pink glow. The nature of this radiance is unknown but while the authors of the project like the character of the story “Tsunami” wandered around the city, they recognized its color — periwinkle.   

The project was made in collaboration with Natalia Grigina