Alina Kleytman
Alina Kleytman is a native of the industrial metropolis of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine and one of the most trenchant Ukrainian artists of her generation—a generation whose work, which builds upon the blossoming of the arts that occurred during the Orange Revolution, has taken up the experiences of that political upheaval’s protagonists in a critical manner. Disillusioned by its failure, and having been socialized in a structurally conservative climate and a media environment characterized by the loudly proclaimed careerist illusions of neoliberal transformation and both real and constant economic and social crisis in a
society dominated by chauvinistically corrupt and sexist figures, those years saw Ukraine’s big cities give rise to the parallel coexistence of youth culture milieus and subcultures marked by drug excesses, extreme bodily experiences, self-harm, and sexual deviance, themes upon which Kleytman’s work is based. Kleytman’s videos, which stem from such autobiographical experiences, follow the “damsel in distress” narrative where the female protagonist is engulfed in moments of peril and has to find her own way out. In these instances, Kleytman enacts various types of masquerade that refer to psycho-social shifts in her perception of reality. The harshness of life is reflected by loud screaming or suspenseful noise, with surreal moments evolving out of the artist’s chosen settings. These are mainly private situations that hint at her home country’s social configurations as well as their inherent political dimensions. The subject finds herself left alone and has to cope with physical and psychological extremes, resulting in excessive and exuberant behavior that leaves viewers bewildered as they attempt to intuit the reasons for the respective actions. Kleytman uses the trope of heightened visuality to analyze moments in which the self is forced to act within a restrictive environment. Reacting to the ubiquitous image production and proliferation of everyday media, Kleytman’s work counters such moments of visuality with psychic patterns of reality. G.S./W.S.
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