Anna Kryvenko

Great Illusion

Anna Kryvenko, video and fine art photography artist based in Prague and Kyiv

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Anna Kryvenko (1986, Ukraine) is a video and fine art photography artist based in Prague and Kyiv. She graduated from the Centre for Audio-Visual Studies at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU, Prague). Her films and performances were screened at Dok Leipzig, ZagrebDox, Visions du Reel Nyon, Fluidum Festival, Jihlava Documentary Film Festival, etc. With her found-footage film Silently Like a Comet, she won the prize for the Best Experimental Act at FAMUFEST, Prague (CZ), and a few others. Her film Listen to the Horizon won the prize for the Best Czech Experimental Documentary, Jihlava IDFF (CZ). Her first feature documentary film My Unknown Soldier won the Last Stop Trieste 2018 Postproduction Award, Special Mention at Zagreb Dox, the Special Prize of the Jury at IDFF CRONOGRAF, and the Andrej Stankovič Prize. Her newest short film Easier Than You Think won the Jury Award of the Other Vision Competition 2022 (PAF, Czech Republic).

Project Description

“Great Illusion”: In Wikipedia, we read that “the geographical centre of Europe is a hypothetical point that depends on the definition of the borders of Europe and is determined mainly by the chosen method of calculation.” I would like to look at the search for this mythical point—the centre of Europe—as an attempt to understand the colonial way of looking at the world. We are still starting from a context of pioneering and marking on the map places that are far away, discovering new places that belong to us. And so the attempt to find the centre becomes a colonial mechanism because each time the centre is in the countries that mark the periphery of geopolitical life—Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Slovakia. At present, 13 geographical points in 11 countries compete for the “title” of the centre of Europe. Not a single scientist has ever shown this centre beyond the borders of their own country. In this video essay and exhibition project, I would like to work with contemporary and historical maps of Europe to look at how the notion of the centre has changed throughout the 20th and 21st centuries and continues to do so. Everyone says that with the outbreak of war in Ukraine, this country “appeared” on the map of the perception of ordinary Europeans. As a narrative line, I am going to treat a pseudo-scientific, almost mystical narrative like the films and TV sitcoms of the 90s—the Bermuda Triangle, mysteries and reality suddenly disappearing off the map. What language do we use when we describe a particular place and how we see it? What if we still lived in a world where there could be blank spots on the map? What if, for our consciousness, such zones still exist and even expand because they lie outside our ideas of centre and periphery?