VV: 20 years later

Last Friday Kyiv’s Bereznitsky Gallery Kiev-Berlin opened a photography exhibit entitled “Those Were the Days” in honor of the 20th anniversary of the famous rock group VV (Vopli Vidopliasova). The idea to hold the exhibit emerged last year. The group’s front man Oleh Skrypka even joked that they would have to ask for The Day’s permission to hold this event because this newspaper traditionally marks its birthday with a photography exhibit.

According to the organizers, “Those Were the Days” is a story of the group through the eyes of the best photographers of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Toronto, and Paris. The exhibit also features pictures shot by VV lead singer. A few old works whose negatives have not survived were restored especially for this event. Some of them date back to the period before the Chervona Ruta-89 festival, by far the least known period for many of the group’s aficionados.

“I met Oleh in 1986,” musician Yuriy Tovstohan recalls, “when some professional groups, including Kvartyra-50 and Eden, set up a club to support the rock movement in Ukraine. We used to audition and test amateur groups. A little-known group called VV came to us and we were simply stunned by their performance! We, musicians, who were playing classic art rock and heavy metal, didn’t understand the group’s name, style, or its up-to-date takes on rock music. Although so many years have passed, I think Oleh is continuing to work in the punk rock genre and gravitates to hard rock. The VV may be said to be a special phenomenon in Ukrainian musical culture.”

Many people got to know the group after it won at the high-profile Chervona Ruta-89. “I remember Skrypka look dashing and boyish, and there was less commercialism in his songs. He hadn’t yet had the experience of job-seeking in France and was an unrecognized but authoritative figure,” says Serhii Arkhypchuk, artistic director of Chervona Ruta-89. “The festival was looking exactly for these kinds of exceptional individuals, personalities who were conveying the image of a new Ukraine and who, if I may say so, had a backbone and face all their own, full of self-respect.”

The exhibit covers every period of VV’s artistic life: the members’ sojourn in France, their return to Ukraine in the mid-1990s, and the present (a total of more then 500 photos).

As the photo exhibit opened, the group also presented its retrospective album “Those Were the Days,” which has been in the making for the past 20 years.

The exhibit continues until Nov. 19, 2006.