Daniil Shumikhin

This particular project by Daniil Shumikhin was influenced by a Soviet monument in Olesk, a village near Lviv, Ukraine. The artwork depicts a plaster reproduction of a bronze hand, which is the only remaining element of the memorial after acts of vandalism by the local population. Shumikhin uses the hand as a symbol of decommunisation, serving as a memorial to the past. Daniil Shumikhin’'s project Hand (2017) refers to the colossal Soviet-era Monument to the Soldiers of Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army (1975) in Olesko, Ukraine, which has been dismantled from 2015 to 2017 after the Ukrainian Parliament passed an amended decommunization law to ban communist symbols from public spaces. As the monument was in the process of deconstruction for several years, it seemed to disintegrate over time into parts. Citizens also dismantled the monument sheet after sheet and sold the precious metals. The Hand interprets this split-in-time monument and offers an alternative form of reading its remnants, putting forward new ways of critically examining the monument’s history and the historical events it commemorates. The artist shares the opinion of the US-American theorist and historian Lewis Mumford, as outlined by James E. Young, about the memorial’s unyielding fixedness in space which is, consequently, its death in time:. “Time drags old meanings into new contexts, estranging a monument’s memory from both past and present, holding past truths up to ridicule in present moments.” Shumikhin takes up that irony regarding the illusory nature of totalitarianism, which carved its bulky ideas and inhuman heroes in huge monuments. His photo montage emphasizes the unsustainability of the ideas of the communist past: the soldier’s hand, the only figurative element remaining of the memorial, creates a strange presence as it levitates above the landfill of the post-industrial city.. He recalls the utopian nature of the political system and its glorification on the one hand and the irrational destruction of historical memory on the other. In his work, the artist explores the impermanence of monuments once regarded as immutable and eternal.
Kateryna Ray

In his artwork, Daniil Shumikhin confronts the Soviet endeavor of creating a new type of building that would encompass various forms of artwork and serve as a hub for communication with the people, as well as a venue for mass gatherings and cultural enrichment. However, this idealistic building could only exist in a utopian realm and therefore remained an intangible dream, an attempt to retreat from reality into a nonexistent past.

In his artwork, Daniil Shumikhin confronts the Soviet endeavor of creating a new type of building that would encompass various forms of artwork and serve as a hub for communication with the people, as well as a venue for mass gatherings and cultural enrichment. However, this idealistic building could only exist in a utopian realm and therefore remained an intangible dream, an attempt to retreat from reality into a nonexistent past.

The brutal murders of ideological opponents. The replacement of historical memory. The lies in foreign social media networks of people. Each a partial description of the ongoing war in Ukraine. My drawings are made with a graphite pencil on a simple A4 landscape sheet. Each one a piece of news about a real war from the virtual world, from the Internet. Unfortunately, web 2.0 algorithms have turned groups into closed communities, inevitably leading to misunderstandings among people. An unwavering trust abused and driven blindly to the most extreme point of unresolve - war!