Installation. Instagram pictures taken in occupied Stakhanov during the year 2015 transferred onto slides.
Olena was born and grew up in Stakhanov, Ukraine. It is now in the war zone and there is virtually no possibility of visiting it. On Jan 1, 2015, she set up and wrote a script that downloads all public photos taken on the occupied Ukrainian territories in real time. Then another one, to sort photos by colors and create flags of two countries — Ukraine and Russia. Each one consists of several hundreds of daily people’s lives photo in occupied zone.
Since then she has made a book dummy and an interactive prototype. The project is changing every day with the addition of new photos and will already be different by the time you see this text. For this curatorial project, she proposes a site-specific installation, where photos will be selected from her native town, turned into mounted slides and shown using an old Kodak slide projector with a slide carousel. With this practice, she re-contextualizes Instagram images, stripping them out of their nature and making this installation a crossing of digital, analogue, personal, private, artificial, and natural.