25 July 1998

ARCHIVE A3 (1995–2026) — archival photo pigment print on semi-glossy paper. From a series of 34 prints.

25 July 1998
Vladimir Putin is appointed director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the main successor of the Soviet KGB

Edition of 3 + 2 AP.

When leaving Alchevs’k, Donbas, Marko Kolomytskyi arranged for a large family archive spanning from the 1960s to 2026 to be evacuated. In the exhibition Maman sous cellophane, he presents a selection of images from 1995 to 2026 under the title ARCHIVE A3 (1995-2026). Wedding photographs, birthdays, walks, New Year celebrations, and ordinary scenes unfold before us. Gradually, an entire family history comes into view. Then something shifts. Beginning in 2014, photographs abruptly give way to administrative documents: bills, receipts, identity papers, certificates. It is as though the bureaucracy of war progressively invades the space of memory. The outside world enters directly into familial intimacy. It becomes impossible to maintain a clear separation between political history and everyday existence.

Looking closely at the series, one realizes that this intrusion had already been present beforehand, though in latent form. The artist subtly introduces political events that gradually announce the coming catastrophe: energy tensions and the so-called “gas wars” between Russia and Ukraine, presidential elections, military rhetoric, nuclear threats, and finally the outbreak of war in 2014. These elements pass through ordinary images before progressively overtaking the entire space through the bureaucracy of occupation.