Maya Kolesnik – Via Void

There are times, when each of us has some feeling of a little excitation, sitting in a plane or simply driving up to airport. You know – a sort of a cocktail, prepared from children’s delight and neurasthenic aerophobia, a sort of a joy of lifting and senile irritation of deprivation in the crowd. In the first half of the twentieth century people composed songs and wrote poetries about metal birds, who could move you to an irresistible distance within few minutes, and the heroic image of a pilot was a dream of all young ladies in muslin. By the beginning of the twenty-first century this romantic had somehow abated, graceful rotary-wing vehicles have been replaced by titanium giant Boeings, and the world’s best airports grind multimillion human mass every day, like stuff in the industrial plant.

Maya Kolesnik sings to us a cruel ballad about this new era. She describes the brutal world of transatlantic flights, operated by transnational companies, in extremely hard way – atypically for the weaker sex indeed. There is no place for human being in this world, and people are just names on boarding cards, photographs in the passport control, gray line of passengers. Kolesnik uses black and white colors mainly, which turn her works into a promotional airline poster or into countless images of airport surveillance cameras, X-ray scanners and electronic scoreboard. There are many direct gray lines in this world: runways, baggage conveyor belts, the horizon line, routes and directions. And yes, there is no place for human being in this world, but there is something very human, something very personal for each of us – a sort of an odd excitation from collisions with cold steel gleam aviation.