| SOSka group |
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Founded in 2005 by Mykola Ridnyi, * 1985 in Kharkov (UA), Ganna Kriventsova, * 1985 in Evpatoria (UA), and Serhiy Popov, * 1978 in Komsomolsk (UA), live and work in Kharkov
In a farmer’s yard, a young man builds up a small gallery of artwork prints by famous artists – amongst them darlings of the art scene such as Neo Rauch, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Komar and Melamid, and Chuck Close – and attempts to trade them with the villagers for various products. Going by the video images, the location of these events seems to be in a rural area. To be precise, this takes place in a small village in the Ukraine, in Prokhody. Barter, the title of the video work means the exchange of goods or services for other goods or services without using money. Whereas globally the prices for modern and contemporary art seem to skyrocket – the financial crisis of 2007 only briefly throttled this price development – a work by Cindy Sherman here is worth as much as a chicken. Close and Lichtenstein’s blonde lovelies are auctioned off for three dozen eggs just because the artist’s self portrait reminds the buyer of her deceased husband and the blonde looks a bit like her granddaughter. Warhol’s famous Campbell’s Soup Cans arouse no interest at all. In a very humorous way, the video shows works of art, which actually command the highest prices on the art market, in a rural setting where art is not important and the works are “only pictures” and therefore are simple trading goods. The trade on the farm points on the one side at the basic functioning mechanisms of the art market, under whose auspices the art system produces stars and determines the value of the art. On the other side, Barter also shows the limitations of the historiography of art, which (not only in Prokhody) can hardly uphold any claim to universal validity. (KB) 
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