Biały Orzeł and Others. Photography

Permanent Vacation by Andrij BojarovArtist and architect Andrij Bojarov’s new photographic project presents an original "documentation" of the private life of temporary housing.

Hotels, motels, hostels and rented apartments – that inseparable element of all our business, tourist and creative travel – usually remain "beyond the frame" of attention, focused on new meetings and impressions. We assess them only in categories of comfort or lack thereof; we only remember the saliently funny or unpleasant. Meanwhile, the unnoticed, passive, abstract "life" of these standardized residences, which provide us shelter during the "home – abroad – home" transit, can become an interesting experiment in delving into a parallel reality.

This is precisely what Andrij Bojarov does with his experiment. Bojarov had the idea to present the cinematic and literary potential of rooms that become the temporary home away from home. These passive witnesses of their temporary tenants’ life perform the mission placed on them – to provide privacy, and a roof over one’s head. At times their comfort is more protected and stabile, than that of one’s own home – after all no intimate or stranger will visit or phone here, where you are temporarily free from all connections to the world... At the same time, you become a voluntary "hostage" of an almost Castanedian "crack between the worlds," where added to the neutrality of space is a multidimensional and nuanced atmosphere, the thicker for the length of your stay. It is this atmosphere that Andrij Bojarov set out to capture.

He has managed to turn a collection of unpretentious fragments of rented interiors he has seen on his travels in Europe, complete with unattractive street views, into a kind of script for a story with no beginning or end, so favored by film magicians  David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch. The author’s treatment turned the banal reality of space into a meditative contemplation of "conditional decorations" as surrealist metaphors and categories that can flow in and out of each other, transforming and complementing, activating the imagination, experience and abilities of those who take the trouble to "read between the lines."

In my opinion, the essence of this project can be summarized in a quote by Boris Groys, one of the most prominent art theorists of our time: "If art is understood as the production of images, then it really does almost completely dissolve in mass art production. However, four decades ago conceptualism already faced this dilemma, and offered the solution of turning art into reflection on the production of images. We must simply construct another level over this mass – and that will be the level of professional art. Professional art, thus, is not gone, but merely relocated to a different niche."

Natalia Kosmolinska, Art Historian