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Ilya Chichkan was born in 1967 in Kiev, Ukraine. His artistic works are particularly concerned with staged photography and film, alongside of which he places apart the theme of figure and object mutation. These surreal picture worlds are often achieved with very simple means of clothing the figures and actors or the alienation of objects.
For the works that are displayed in the daadgalerie, Chichkan fashioned an over-sized football in the film-workshop of the Babelsberg Studio which was then taken to different places of importance. With this idea in mind Chichkan travelled back to the Ukraine to place the object before the skyline of the Chernobyl atomic energy plant, which became known as a result of the disaster that took place there in 1985. The photograph documents a performance, in which in the accompanying video the artist himself acts with a pair of stag antlers on his head, in order to move this absurd object before this backdrop. Suddenly the enlarged football "mutates" before the industrial architecture, which is heavily laden with meaning, into an object that spreads horror; the football looks like a clone.
During this year's biannual in Venice Chichkan travelled along the Grand Canal with this football in a private performance with a gondolier and distributed, as a result, a zany atmosphere with the same object but in a different place. Finally the ball is displayed like a monument before a romantic landscape of fields, sunsets with wind-farm turbines so that the football here can show all cliches of sports field, energy, landscape and art being brought together. Berlin, 7th July 2005 Friedrich Meschede |