Political art – everything is at stake

Do you know “Lucy”? Scientifically known as Australopithecus Afarensis, it is considered one of the most important crescent of modern people. She lived in East Africa about 3.2 million years ago, and her partly preserved skeleton was discovered in 1974 by the paleoanthropologist Donald Carl Johanson in Ethiopia. “Lucy” is an impressive evidence of the evolutionary origin of man from the monkey – a fundamental idea of ​​modern science, which is still fascinated and provoked today.

The current series of image by the artist Yury Kharchenko also deals with this interface between man and monkey. In his works that oscillate between past and future, he refers to the iconic American science fiction franchise “Planet of the Apes” (Planet of the Affen), which began in 1968 with the film adaptation of Pierre Boule’s novel.

Yury Kharchenko often uses old pictures of Berlin flea markets as the starting material – finds of unknown artists, often long -deceased. He paints these ready-made landscapes and transforms them into his own scenic picture spaces, in which he specifically implanted affecting figures in futuristic poses.

A particularly distinctive work shows a kiss of two monkeys in front of an idyllic-naive landscape. The scene inevitably reminds of the farewell scene from the first “Planet of the Affen” film, in which the Astronaut Taylor (Charlton Heston) of the chimpanzee Dr. Zira (Kim Hunter) gives a kiss – a moment full of symbolic power that marries romance and dystopia in Kharchenko’s version.

The plot of the film is known: Taylor strands on a foreign planet where intelligent monkeys prevail over primitive humanity. The final scene in which he discovers the destroyed statue of freedom reveals that it is located on the post -apocalyptic earth – a civilizational memento Mori. The various sequels of the film culminated in a time loop in which monkeys and people swap their roles, violence is repeated and every utopia is corrupted by new forms of power. This cyclical structure is radicalized in the cinematic new edition of the 2010s. Ultimately, the film count leads to an existential state of emergency, in which no longer fights well against evil, but species against species. Language, power, ethics – everything is at stake.

Kharchenkos work this narrative, but not as an illustration, but as a reflection. The artist takes the monkeys out of their cinematic framework and places them in new, sometimes time -raised compositions. His monkeys are not clear: neither animal nor man, neither the future nor the past. They come into the picture as avatars of humanity who no longer recognizes itself.

The artistic concept of Kharchenkos is a game level of deconstruction. The sky are transformed into comic -like, dark colored areas, landscapes are reduced to symbolic remains, for example tree trunks. This creates inhospitable, artificial areas of a negative utopia in which nobody wants to live voluntarily.

A shocking picture shows an apparently floating monkey head, the black hair of which is reminiscent of vanitas representations of James Ensor. Kharchenko dramatizes the scenery with a gestured arrow that thwarts the picture – a symbol that can stand as much as for return.

In art history, monkeys and artists are connected in a variety of ways. The artist’s representation as a monkey refers to his outsider role – a classic motive that art history has known since the 17th century. Artists present themselves as imitating “monkeys of nature” and reflect on or caricaturing their self -image. Kharchenko is also in this tradition. His monkeys are not a parody, but reflection. They demonstrate the human, exaggerate it, compact it. And that is exactly what their strength lies: they don’t just show, they question reality.

Certain problems irritate with new urgency. Covid-19 pandemic has rediscovered the body as a place of political: isolation, infection, mortality suddenly became universally noticeable. War again and again worldwide make the belief in the peacefulness of man and human progress become hollow. In the face of destruction, people lose themselves in their own hybris. The technical superiority that once took him from “Lucy” has led him into a situation in which civilization itself is put into disposition.

Kharchenko’s monkey pictures are no longer science fiction. You are anthropologies of now. The monkey does not look back from a distant future – he is already standing next to him. In his facial expressions, his physicality, its presence it becomes clear what we have forgotten: that man is not only reason, but also instinct, drive, desire. That history does not go linearly, but breaks, falls back.

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In addition to the destruction, the topic of love appears again and again in Kharchenko’s work. In some pictures we see monkey pairs in front of burning landscapes or cosmic backgrounds – sometimes as silhouettes, sometimes abstracted to recognition. A work is reminiscent of van Gogh in its flaming color intensity, another of HR Giger’s Alien-Welten and the romantic naivety of the comic series »Love is…« by Kim Casali. The power of love here is not rescue, but resistance potential against the complete dissolution of the human.

This mixture of intimacy and end times, quote and disruption makes Kharchenko’s series so fascinating. It is a reflection of our present – at a time between digital withdrawal, actually physical fear and geopolitical fainting. But art begins again in this crisis. The mimetic monkey in the mirror relationship with the world becomes visible again. He doesn’t only paint, rather he interprets, reminds and activates.

The German-Israeli historian Dan Diner recognizes the end of the idea of ​​linear progress in the break of civilization: civilization itself can turn into barbarism. Kharchenko’s monkey people are fragile remains of this knowledge – survivors of a break that does not allow return to innocence. At Kharchenko there is ultimately a destroyed space: over -painted, fragmented landscapes, whose injuries remain visible. Kharchenko’s monkey people remind us that evolution is not a linear narrative, but a spiral full of repetitions, setbacks and sudden upheavals. In her sad eyes, not only the past lies, but also the question of whether we want a future that we design ourselves – or whether we have long been back on the way back to “Lucy”.

In the synthesis of all of these perspectives it becomes clear: Kharchenko’s art is not a dystopian terror image, but a radical ethical meditation: the focus is not on the new, but the recognition and preservation of injuries. The work of the artist living in Berlin (born in 1986) asks the radical question of how responsibility is still possible after the break after the loss of all origin myths: through the awareness of one’s own fragility and by recognizing the foreign, never very tangible trace of the other.