Underwater invites you for a walk through the physical and metaphorical backyards of Ukraine. Oksana, the director, walks with her friends AntiGonna, Ksenia and Masha through industrial landscapes tangled with lush greenery, slowly sinking into the dark waters of their past.
AntiGonna used to live between her father’s home in Odesa, her mother’s flat in Vinnytsia, and nightclubs in Kyiv. She creates experimental videos which she calls ‘horror porn’ – a puzzling mixture art curators, film programmers and viewers never know quite how to handle, yet which fascinates like the first glimpse of one’s face in an alien mirror.
Kseniya used to live in Zaporizhia, an industrial city in the south-east of Ukraine. She works as a hairdresser to provide for her two daughters and elderly mother, and in her free time creates mutant dolls from found objects, paper and food. These dolls tell stories Ksenia herself is not able to speak about.
Masha fled from hometown of Donetsk when the war broke out in 2014, and then her second home – Mariupol – in 2022. She cuts up tabloid magazines – religious, pornographic, cookery, dating – and reshapes them through collage practice into a reality where queer Jesus preaching to kittens is a real possibility.
Through conversations with her friends and herself, Oksana reveals connections between the four of them and weaves a collective narrative about the many wars that women have to fight throughout their lives.
This project is part of DOK Preview Training.