Sai, Oleksiy: Mildew (2018)

installation
Long-term loan from the Peter und Irene Ludwig Stiftung, Aachen, 2019
Keywords

The new installation continues a series of works on the subject of the so-called “office monkeys”, that is, the lowest caste of workers in the office hierarchy. The crowds of impersonal people wearing grey each day reproduce the monotonous routine of clerks’ life. “Mildew” – this is how this category of people is called contemptuously in Ukraine. However, at the same time these people become a great force in the moments of social turbulences. That was the case in Ukraine in 2004, and the same happened in 2014. Ukrainian middle class threw off their ties and went out on the streets. In spring of 2014 somebody literally went straight out from the office to war in the East of the country. However, revolutions and wars end, and impersonal men and women with constant smiles on their faces return to their usual way of life. Like the real mildew, they expand everywhere where there is an opportunity to deploy workspaces, distributing, as an epidemic, their specific way of life and thinking. And only sometimes, at the ritual Friday parties, the fuzzy images of other times when grey little people were able to make history appear.