The Polish Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2024 in Venice, is an audiovisual exploration of the sound of war, titled ‘Repeat after Me II’. Created by Open Group a collective founded in August 2012 in Lviv by six Ukrainian artists. The group’s members have changed over the years, and at present they are: Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach and Anton Varga. The group’s work explores the relationship between people and contextual spaces, creating the so-called open situations. Performativity and cooperation with viewers and participants are important parts of their work – elements that are used in ‘Repeat after Me II’
Repeat after Me II is a collective portrait of witnesses of the ongoing war in Ukraine. The videos presented were created in 2022 and 2024. The exhibition features civilian refugees relaying their experiences of the war through the sounds of weapons they remember, then inviting the audience to repeat after them. Open Group employ an interactive karaoke format in which the tracklist list is not hit songs, it is shots, missiles, howling, and explosions, and the lyrics are descriptions of deadly weapons. This is the soundtrack of the war. The juxtaposition of works from 2022 and 2024 shows the drastic perseverance of memory, as well as the changes in technology. The first video was shot in a camp for ‘domestic refugees’ outside of Lviv. The second work was created outside of Ukraine, in locations that were safe for the participants. Yet even beyond the reach of the marathon of sirens, the sounds of war remain part of their trauma and symbolically widen their scope.
The work aims to portray war as a collective experience, whilst calling attention to individual experiences. ‘It was very important to us, to bring the awareness back to Ukraine. Obviously, after these two years being in the war, people are starting to forget.’
Anton Varga / Open Group
