Blind Spot

In the Blind Spot series, Mykola Ridnyi made use of press photographs illustrating reports on the war in the Donbas. Each of the photographs from eastern Ukraine was transformed by the artist. In ten of them, the centre was sprayed with black paint; in the next ten, the image can be seen only in a small, slightly off-centre circle and the rest of the surface is dark.

The photographs are accompanied by four smaller drawings with descriptions explaining the anatomy and physiology of the human eye. This is because the title of the work refers to the blind spot, the punctum caecum in medical terminology, a small area of the retina which has no photoreceptors and therefore is not sensitive to light. In the eyeballs of humans and other vertebrates, these spots are placed in such a way that those “dead areas” in the field of vision do not overlap. The unregistered elements of reality are interpolated by the visual cortex in the brain based on the person’s knowledge and memory and on the image derived from the vicinity of the blind point.

Ridnyi turned the physiological blind spots and the pathological “dead areas” in the field of vision, collectively known as scotomas, into a metaphor of the Ukrainian society. In his works, the images of destruction in Donetsk and Luhansk are mediated and incomplete. As such, they illustrate the nature of the media content, which is determined by the political views of the reporters and analysts. The war propaganda drowns the Ukrainian society in information chaos; it shows the conflict one-sidedly, deliberately overlooking its other aspects. Disoriented citizens, whose views are shaped by the newspaper and television reports, lose the acuity of their vision, their perspective and ability to compare and critically evaluate pieces of news. Those black areas in the image of Ukraine’s present-day realities may also be viewed from the viewpoint of the future: the inevitable deformations of historical truth, oversimplifications regarding the essence of the conflict, obscuring its multidimensional nature.

Works from the Blind Spot cycle were exhibited paired with passages from poems Serhiy Zhadan* (Berlin 2014, Venice 2015 and others). In this context, the dark areas in Ridnyi’s works acquired new meanings, opening to individual stories and personal experience of the war, which Zhadan described but which was absent from media reporting.

Izabela Kopania

translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz

*  Published in Poland in the collection Drohobycz. Księga wierszy wybranych (2014–2016), translated by J. Podsiadło, Warszawa 2018.