Victor Sydorenko - Depersonalization

Depersonalization, Viсtor Sydorenko’s installation exhibited on a street in Kyiv in 2008, left an ambiguous impression. The painted figures with their active coloring brought in a playful element of postmodernism whereas the very essence of the monotonous unified casts unsettled and repelled the public. The human stream that flowed past the figures must have recalled the idea from the Stalinist era: people are nothing but cogs and wheels of the state machine.

Forcing an idol to play the role of a human-shaped sculpture, Viktor Sydorenko created an image of total Imagelessness. The artist adopted postmodern technologies to summon the spirits of the past and graft them onto the artistic tree of our rather indiscriminate modernity in his project where the idols of unification (that is, abstraction of personhood) walked the streets of Kyiv, Paris and New York.