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Film&Video

Until You Disappear

2026

Two-channel HD video, 13’43’’
Music: MACHUKHA
Cinematography: Alex Brack & Mats Meisen

Performers: Oleksasandra Volokytenko, Nataliia Oliferovych, Viacheslav Kononov, Kyryll Samsonov, Maksym Stepchuk, Anita Tor, Stepan Gazhal, Mykyta Bunin, Daria Chernina, Kseniia Pereplotchykova

Commissioned by Manifesta 16 Ruhr. Co-produced with Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and Kontakt Collection, Vienna.

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The piece revisits children’s street games that were popular in the 1990s post‑Soviet area. Most of them incorporate discord, brutality and violence at their core. This performative reenactment involving adult Ukrainian refugees and migrants, reveals how violence persists as a ritualised and gamified component. The two-channel work features a soundtrack composed by Ukrainian post-metal band Machukha [Stepmother]. The accompanying documentary footage speaks of a fiction film Until the First Blood about a military-style game called played by children at a summer camp, with participants split into "blues" and "greens" – and "dead" once their insignia are taken away. Filmed in 1989 in Crimea, years before Russia’s annexation of the peninsula and the ensuing war in Ukraine (2014), it provides a reference for Ridnyi’s work – its title Until You Disappear reflects on the current stage of war as a vicious cycle of violence in which both the aggressors and the victim consider the complete obliteration of the enemy as the only solution.​

 

Installlation view:

Manifesta 16 Ruhr, St. Anna church, Bochum, 2026

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