Border zone violation

On March 24, on World Tuberculosis Day, the Great Surprise project was launched in the National Art museum of Ukraine. For the last decade our country has had one of the highest indexes that shows the number of sick people with this diagnosis. So, the project is aimed at drawing attention to this problem, and the main thing is to raise the question of our attitude to people with this disease.

Great Surprise is a series of seemingly unnoticeable and unexpected interventions of the REP art group (Kseniia Hnylytska, Mykyta Kadan, Zhanna Kadyrova, Volodymyr Kuznietsov, Lada Nakonchna, and Lesia Khomenko) in the museum artistic space. In the expositions of icons, Ukrainian Baroque works, and items from the 19th and 20th centuries, false walls were replaced by… windows. Through them small warehouses can be seen, where the pictures and the sculptures of social realism times, which do not represent the artistic value, are stored. The windows are represent the violation of the peculiar border zone between the healthy and the sick, people of different classes (tuberculosis targets mostly poor folk).

Among the thematic exhibits, tables with inscriptions taken from the everyday life appeared, for example, “There is a tuberculosis clinic in the village where my aunt lives. There is a park around the clinic. In the childhood, when I was passing by, the local boys said, “There tubics (sick people with tuberculosis – Ed.) are going back and forth.” I always imagined transparent shadows that were swaying under the trees… but never saw them.”

Apart from that, a book was published that contains the thoughts of artists, an interview with Vasyl Melnyk, deputy director of the Yanovsky Institute of Phthisiology and Pulmonology of the Academy of the Medical Sciences of Ukraine, and a monologue of Olesia Vovchko, former patient of a TB dispensary. Now Olesia is working as a consultant trainer for tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS at a local TB dispensary in Zaporizhia. Her personal testimony is impressive, “After the photofluorography examination they found the changes in the lungs, started additional examinations but deep in my heart I already knew – tuberculosis. I could not recognize, calm down, and accept the diagnosis for two years…” Mykola Kadan, artist, notes, “We can talk more about the Great Surprise. It is not only about tuberculosis; it is more about the culture of shame and hiding and about how we try to insulate ourselves from unpleasant information. It is about not only a medical, but also social diagnosis.”

Great Surprise became possible due to the support of Rinat Akhmetov’s fund “Development of Ukraine.” Since 2007 the fund has been implementing a large-scale project “Stop Tuberculosis.” Besides, this year it was chosen to be the main recipient of the grant of the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria in the amount of 100 million dollars. It will help Ukraine to fight with a tuberculosis epidemic, above all by providing qualitative medical and related services to the sick.