Shcherbenko Art Centre

Black on Prussian Blue

The video is part of the project Black on Prussian Blue by Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev, in which they continue to research collective trauma. In this project, the focus of the artists is World War II seen by a Wehrmacht soldier and the perpetrators’ gaze on the lands occupied by them. The project presents the reconstructions of amateur photographs from the soldier’s albums created with the help of land, video, and copies of archival images.

During the residency in Vienna, the artists stumbled upon an extensive family photo archive, which belonged to an Austrian soldier who served in the Luftwaffe. The owner of the archive participated in the most important events of World War II, so all of them were present in these albums meticulously tagged. It was also noteworthy that occupied Western Europe – Belgium and France – was represented mainly by beautiful landscapes, architectural monuments, and stunning scenery. Otherwise, pictures from Poland, Ukraine, Belarus are mostly photos of soil. Ground, dirt, unpaved roads occupy at least two-thirds of the picture while houses and trees were somewhere up away from the photographer.

Are those photos an embodiment of a perpetrator’s gaze? Do they depict the aggressor’s perception of the recently conquered countries as nothing more than a resource stripped of any subjectivity and even beauty? Or was it a conscious choice of the photographer to lower his eyes and thus avoid seeing violence and blood, for example, the scenes of the Holocaust that his army had brought onto these lands?

The video is an addition to the photos from the archive. This is a documentation of the sand scattering, which correlates with the transformation of events over time.