KINBURN WALKTHROUGH
2023
4K video, 7’53”, color, sound
in collaboration with Oleg Yushko
realized with the support of:
KINBURN is my virtual museum – form of re-existence of my site-specific installations in the digital world of a computer game. The prototype of this world is the Kinburn Spit, a nature reserve in the northwestern part of the Kinburn Peninsula, between the Dnieper and the Black Sea. In the 1990s, it was possible to live there under the open sky.
I used to visit often, and once I even stayed for a month. When you are on the spit, you feel lost in time and space. As you move along the shore, the view before your eyes barely changes. It’s as if you’re moving without changing location. The shore of the Kinburn Spit is an ideal platform for contemplating the horizon, where nothing obstructs the view from edge to edge of the boundary between sea and sky. Looking out to sea, the sunrise is on the left edge of the field of view, while the sunset can be seen on the right edge. The sun and the moon, constantly appearing and disappearing with slight changes against the screen-like backdrop of sea and sky, become the main characters of this show.
This place has become an ideal being from Plato’s world of ideas in my imagination, a being of which all my works are expressions. One of the installations, realized in 2009 in the underground tunnel of KIT (Kunst im Tunnel in Düsseldorf) and transferred to Kinburn in the underwater bunker, is a reproduction of the nocturnal landscape on the spit: before the eyes an infinite dark space, in the center of which a white wave constantly renews itself along the entire horizon.
In the world of the computer game KINBURN, created in the image of the Kinburn Spit, I recreate my site-specific video installations. Each work realised in a particular space, together with the architectural fragment that is an integral part of it, is transferred to the virtual coast as a separate island.
The video shows a passage through the KINBURN world, played by me and recorded directly from the screen.