Strangers in the Metro

Ra Gallery is hosting the second part of the project Social Projections, called Strangers. After one descends the stairs to the gallery the impression is of being in the Kyiv metro. On the wall of one hall one sees unfamiliar metro stations with familiar names race by. The windows open on the Berlin cityscape, but the names of the metro stations belong to Kyiv. Watching a strange city through a metro car window was unusual, hearing the all too familiar voices begging for money. On the opposite wall people were going up and down the stairs of Frankfurt Airport, appearing from nowhere and vanishing into the same nothingness. Photographs in the next hall illuminated the Kyiv metro routine. The city environment, saturated with social impulses, seems to exist separately from the very cultural phenomenon of the city. It is something of a fragment chaotic movement of life in the metro, railroad stations, and airports, having nothing to do with the city and time, existing at all times and places.

The Strangers by Ukrainian artists Marharyta Zinets, Oleksandr Vereshchak, and Lesia Zayets is a creative study of the modern urban landscape in its anthropologic, aesthetic, and social aspects. “Industrial problems have of late attracted [public] attention, because they are directly linked to the urgent ontological problem, survival,” says Marharyta Zinets. “Our works show city life as a torn space, without any reference points and where there is no choice.”

The habitat in the Strangers project is a spectacle, on the one hand, without any active approach; on the other, it is rich in extreme manifestations brought forth by the need to defend oneself and to survive.

All those wishing to take a ride in the Strangers’ world are welcome at the Ra Gallery until October 30.