We are very pleased to call your attention to the exhibition Lossy by the young Ukrainian artist duo Volo Bevza and Victoria Pidust in our Vienna gallery. The central theme of the works on display is the loss and recovery of visual authenticity in a world in which images are systematically manipulated and manipulate.

We find ourselves between two poles: on the one hand, the omnipresence of images and their circulation. Information is no longer only accessible via news agencies and traditional media. Today, every person is potentially a news source with reach through distributing texts or images via networks such as Instagram, Telegram or X.

On the other hand, we are confronted with constant manipulation and deliberate disinformation. Politically motivated campaigns use two different methods that amount to the same thing: first, falsified images and information are circulated as authentic material; second, authentic content is denigrated as “fake” and called into question. At the same time, communication services are banned or suppressed, which deliberately creates a lack or displacement of information. Furthermore, images no longer seem to be able to confirm what was, as Photoshop has long since been overtaken by AI and perhaps other discourses on iconography and media ethics are needed.

The two Ukrainian-born artists Victoria Pidust and Volo Bevza deal with the manifold dilemmas arising from this omnipresent “manifestation of uncertainty” in photographic, painterly, and digital ways.

Especially in times of war, images are a much- used instrument of political propaganda. The “war of images” and the “power of images” were demonstrated to us on September 11, 2001, perhaps not for the first time, but definitely very clearly. Countless works of art such as Gerhard Richter’s War Cuts or Hans-Peter Feldmann’s 9/12 Front Page have dealt with the brute force of images in the media. As early as 1985, Martha Rosler addressed the topic of media reporting and political campaigning in her work If it’s too bad to be true it could be DISINFORMATION. The video, in which spoken news excerpts and distorted images are remixed, shows misleading phrases used in the news. Through the deliberate alienation of language and images caused by technical interference, Rosler dissects the flow of mass media and questions the objectivity of reporting.

Pidust and Bevza are also part of this artistic examination of the media’s transformation and deformation of reality, which is based on a current excess of violence that affects them personally: in their new series of works, they deal with the war in Ukraine and the traces it leaves behind, as well as with the images that are created by it and disseminated in the media.

The title of the exhibition, Lossy, refers to the term “lossness.” It comes from a text of the same name by the artist Ed Atkins, in which he reflects on the principle of loss in the processing and compression of digital data, and in particular image data. Glitches in image files are often caused by the lossy reproduction of compressed image information.

Pidust and Bevza work with these transfer errors in digital image processing programs and use them as a creative moment. They use the technique of photogrammetry as a means of generating a digital three-dimensional representation of the photographed object, often from their own photographs. In doing so, they take into account the fallibility of digital systems, so that the “loss” becomes an imaging instrument.

Victoria Pidust calls one of her series of works Irpin Bridge (2023). These are photogrammetrically generated images of real photographs of the destroyed bridge in the town of Irpin. The bridge, known as a “symbol of war,” was blown up to stop the advance of Russian troops towards Kyiv, while at the same time trapping the inhabitants of the town under attack. The images from Irpin were representative of the suffering of Ukrainian civilians.

In another series, enlarged sections of abandoned, destroyed cars taken with an iPhone are on display, which Pidust photographed on location in the towns of Irpin and Butscha. The oversized, sometimes expansive works show the decay and the irritating beauty of ruin, detached from its cause. No-Distance is another series by the artist, which she photographs in analog format. By photographing objects from a short distance, reality fades away. The photographed object remains, but is captured blurred, distorted and unrecognizable in analogue form.

 

Volo Bevza’s works have no titles and are reminiscent of abstract, gestural painting. They are created in a multi-stage process, which also begins with photogrammetrically generated and digitally processed pictorial elements. The techniques Bevza use are both digital and manual. They create something new and yet show the reality of the present: the destroyed houses, bridges, and dead of the Butscha massacre, which he does not, however, include in his pictures in real life but as computer-animated avatars. Authentic photographs, digitally altered image elements, computer-generated renderings, and gestural painting—everything combines to form an amalgam.

Pidust and Bevza succeed in abstracting the images of war but merge this abstraction with their original depictions in such a way that they become a new image. In their surreality—as enlargement, overpainting, and manipulation—these images become a symbol of the brutal chaos of the present.

Pidust and Bevza work with the principle of transferring techniques into levels of meaning: loss in images becomes the imaging principle, cutouts stand as pars pro toto for the confrontation with the war in their own country and the handling of its images.

Again and again, we are reminded of how our own visual memory is formed and how we are able to recognize images and their events in the works of Pidust and Bevza despite the “loss” of visual information. The works oscillate between abstraction, image illusion, and simple image. This recognition is a process that the two artists have anchored in the works and their creation from photography, painting, and digital processing.

The processing of image politics, especially when it concerns the view of one’s own homeland, is an important means of demonstrating that behind the media and reporting lies the human need to confront the incomprehensible in order to be able to deal with the present—to process it.

Victoria Pidust was born in Nikopol in 1992, Volo Bevza in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1993. They studied at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule and live in Berlin. They have taken part in numerous international solo and group exhibitions in recent years, including in Berlin, Bonn, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Leipzig, Munich, Vienna, Linz, Kyiv, Barcelona, Istanbul, Liverpool, London and Paris. Volo Bevza was awarded the Artwork of the Year art prize by the VHV Foundation; Victoria Pidust was awarded the Mart Stam Prize in 2020.

Text: Christina Lehnert