No! No! No! / Ukrainian Artists’ Films

No! No! No!
Ukrainian Artists’ Films

Piotr Armianovski, Mustard in the Gardens (still), 2018.

No! No! No!
Ukrainian Artists’ Films

Admission starts at $5

Date
March 10, 2022, 7pm
172 Classon Avenue
Brooklyn NY 11205
USA

Join us at e-flux Screening Room for a screening of Piotr Armianovski's Mustard in the Gardens (2018), and Mykola Ridnyi's NO! NO! NO! (2017).

Piotr Armianovski's and Mykola Ridnyi’s films explore the traces of the post-2014 Russian-Ukrainian war that have been imprinted into the fabric of the everyday in the Eastern part of Ukraine. Rather than directly addressing the conflict's atrocities, both films focus on the emotions, uncertainties, and ruptures that the extended state of war has inflicted on the everyday lives of young Ukrainians.

Piotr Armianovski, Mustard in the Gardens (2018, 37 minutes)
Olena is going home, to the village where she spent her childhood, now part of the “grey zone” conflict line of the Russian-Ukrainian war. In the garden, her brother has planted mustard to prevent weeds from getting into their neighbors’ garden. Olena lies down in the prickly grass and recalls how big and tasty the apricots, the cherries, the pears used to be...

Mykola Ridnyi, NO! NO! NO! (2017, 22 minutes)
The main protagonists of this film are young people from Kharkiv, a city located in the Eastern part of Ukraine, whose early twenties coincided with the breakout of the war in the neighboring region of Donbass. An LGBT activist and poet, a fashion model, a group of street artists, a creator of a computer game—all of them are artists or working in the creative industries, typical of the peaceful life of a big city. However, the proximity to the war affects each of the characters and their activities. The protagonists react and reflect political events through their specific relationships to social media and to the urban space around them.

Please buy tickets or donate here. All proceeds from ticket sales and donations will go toward the distribution of food and medicine in Ukraine. 

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Category
Film, War & Conflict
Subject
Eastern Europe, Experimental Film, Documentary

Mykola Ridnyi was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. He lives and works in Berlin where he holds a guest professorship in the multimedia art class at the Berlin University of the Arts. In recent films, video installations, and photography cycles, he experiments with nonlinear montage and a collage of documentary and fiction. He works with reenactment, often based on research in Ukrainian and European politics, history, and cinema. Ridnyi reflects on social and political reality and shows the contrast between the fragility and resilience of individual and collective histories. The body of his work created within the last decade addresses the question of how to talk about violence and war without multiplying its brutality in visual language. His works have been presented internationally at various institutions and festivals, including the Manifesta 16 Ruhr (2026), The Kyiv Biennial (2024, 2017, 2015), the Kochi Biennial (2022), the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) among the others.

Piotr Armianovski (Donetsk, 1985) is a performer and filmmaker. Armianovski holds a MSc in Computer Science, and has studied theater and performance art in Kyiv, Lviv, and Moscow. Since the war started in his home city, Armianovski's work focuses on documentary. His films have received awards at Docudays UA, Open Night, and Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, and in 2020 he received the Gaude Polonia scholarship by the Ministry of Arts and National Heritage of Poland. He works and lives in Kyiv.

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