Denys Pankratov
“Eye, Forward!”, 2023–2025, series of photographic documentations, 22 × 14 cm × 20 cm
The photographic documentations of “ekspozycyjki” (a coinage Denys uses, roughly “mini-exhibitions”) were made at temporary deployment points of units in combat zones. These temporary spaces are places where the artist stayed and lived alone or with his unit during his service in the Airborne Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine between 2023 and 2025. Often such deployment points are the abandoned houses of local residents. These sporadic “ekspozycyjki” and interventions in the temporary spaces where soldiers stayed are composed of works by the artist’s friends, photographs or clippings about places or events important to him, as well as fragments of other people’s lives found in these spaces — photographs from someone’s family archive, a sideboard, or a canvas painted with flowers. The photographic documentation records these “ekspozycyjki” with works by the friends themselves and also documents the context of these shows — fragments of interiors and the exhibitions themselves. The “ekspozycyjki”, combined into a single project, capture locations situated in a shared space and the duration of the exhibitions. Place names such as Oczeretyne and Myrnograd in Donetsk oblast are familiar to many Ukrainians from military reports as sites of active combat operations.
