Lesia Vasylchenko

Kyiv, Ukraine, 1990

Lesia Vasylchenko (born in Kyiv, Ukraine) works across a range of media, including video, photography, installation, and curatorial. In her research-based practice, Vasylchenko explores encounters between visual cultures, media technologies, and chronopolitics. She is the founder of STRUKTURA. Time, a cross-disciplinary initiative for research and practice within the framework of visual arts, media archaeology, literature, and philosophy. She holds a degree in Journalism from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and in Fine Arts from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Vasylchenko has recently exhibited at the Pochen Biennial for Multimedia Art (Ex Oriente Ignis), the MUNCH Museum’s Triennale (The Machine Is Us), and the Henie Onstad Triennale for Photography and New Media (New Visions). Her work is part of the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA / Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki, Finland.

MORE

Tachyoness, 2022

Single-channel video, 8 min., 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

The title Tachyoness takes its name from a ‘tachyon’, a hypothetical particle that travels faster than light. The duration In this video is 8 minutes, which is the approximate time Sun light takes to reach our eyes. In this work more than a thousand images of sunrises over Ukraine are constructed into a video sequence using AI technology. The images were collected from archives, advertisements, social media, home VHS videos covering the time period from 1990 to 2022. Tachyoness mirrors this historical period of time as a single event.

The video work troubles the linear perception of time through the use of ‘machine learning’ that ‘predicts’ the future by means of analysing data from the past. A rising sun is the result of an artificial gaze, where a machine eye watches our human realm and dreams about a sunrise of its own.