“Genesis”

The project “Genesis” is the continuation of the multimedia project “Origin,” which was shown in New York in 2006; on the Andriivskyi Uzviz and on Khreshchatyk in Kyiv, and also in Santa Fe and Los Angeles (ArtsLink Award, USA) in 2007. The multimedia “Origin“ project turns to the practice of social sculpture for the untraditional treatment of the subject of the nation's genetic fund. 

Social sculpture lifts the aesthetic from its confines within a particular sphere or media, relocating it in a collective, imaginative work space in which we can see, rethink, and reshape our lives according to our creative potential. The term social sculpture was coined by Joseph Beuys to refer to creative acts that would engage the community and affect the world around it. "Every human being is an artist, a free being called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking, and structures that shape and inform our lives" (Joseph Beuys). According to Beuys, this is an anthropological definition of art, which often works counteractively, expressing aspirations which are difficult to articulate in other spheres. 

This project involves a few years of continuous collaboration with parents of infants, thus actualizing the complex concept of social sculpture initiated by social relations with art. The project, turning to the nature of the reproductive system, works with the theme of the nation's genetic fund. Genesis, like ethno-genesis, is difficult to grasp using only scientific methods as framed by an exclusively scientific paradigm.

The project also touches on the general issue of changing social conditions which caused the Ukrainian population to decrease by five million in the last decades from 52 million in 1990. This unique approach to researching the system of genesis focuses on the act of birth, which is capable of generating a wide spectrum of associations and reactions from euphoria to reference to the scandalous fact that stem cell trade is part of Ukrainian reality. The video installation incorporates the overworked sound of DNA (its melody was recorded by American scientists), and every subsequent birth echoes with a powerful audio splash obtained during an ultrasound scan of human arteries. The photography project examines the woman's body in a multi-dimensional micro-macro reading. The curved lines of the body unveil its consonance with the form of the Ukrainian pysanka, a philosophical symbol of "origin," and on which ornament appears as an ancient cultural code. The photographs feature contemporary ornament, consisting of tattoos and mis-en-scenes played out on the body of a pregnant woman, which allude to civilizational and existential catastrophes. It is as if the miniature figures of people stuck on the surface of the mother’s belly-sphere form an image of the field of civilization on the planet Earth. And so the culmination of the project, which works from the micro-macro symbols of "origin" (pysanka) at the global scale (planet), is a media installation that manifested itself as a video projected onto a balloon which dominated Kyiv’s evening sky, leading its own urban dialogue with the city’s well-known architectural symbols.

The video projection of an ultrasound image of a baby onto an inflatable balloon works to monitor the birth rate in real time; it changes each time an Internet signal announces another birth, which occurs approximately every 2 minutes in New York, every 20 minutes in New Mexico (USA), every 1 minute in California, and, on average, every 1.5 minutes in Ukraine. The newly born children of various backgrounds from various regions of Ukraine form a collective image of a Ukrainian, transforming a Bio Cell into a Human Planet. Thus the "Origin" project produced unique installations in each region of the world where it was installed. In the project “Genesis,” through the cooperation of parents of infants, various pictorial readings are modeled using new communicative visual media, where there is reference to the conflict between the omnipotence of the state and the responsibility for the nation’s genetic fund, the long-standing effects of Chornobyl and new problems related to biological resources, among other social and ethical issues. The cycle of photographs “Babies on Order” turns to the global problem of surrogate motherhood – a theme of passionate debates all over the world. Surrogate motherhood is a reproductive technique in which a woman agrees to become pregnant and bear a child with the intention of ultimately giving it up to be raised by others who will legally be regarded as the child’s parents. The implementation of these reproductive methods, which are tied to many problems of an ethical, medical, and legal character, has placed a dilemma before humanity – to solve the problem of infertility or to go the route of commercialization, which exploits women in the role of paid incubators and is illegal according to the Brussels Declaration of the World Medical Association (1985). Surrogate motherhood is against the law in Austria, Norway, Sweden, France, some states of the USA, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany (in Germany this assistance to infertile parents is outlawed because of its “amorality”). Commercial surrogate motherhood is usually referred to in emotionally charged and potentially offensive terms like "wombs for rent" or "baby farms" and employs such concepts as market, rent of the body, payment for services, profits, raw materials. On a commercial basis, it is allowed in most states of the USA, South Africa, India, Russia, Georgia, and in UKRAINE. How should we regard the fact that a “baby on order” is tied to its surrogate mother not only through its umbilical cord for nine months, but also through deep emotional ties which later, once it comes time to give the child to its new parents, are torn in a most cruel and painful way? This project presents Gogol’s question in 21st-century terms: does “living money = dead soul”? This project does not give instructions or prescribe how to act, but instead asks questions about social space, the social body, the code of existence and life of human beings.

Oksana Chepelyk