GO WEST! THE STORY OF A NON-RETURN
Book presentation with Andrii Dostliev,
Gernot Passath and Aio Per Wednesday, 21 May 2025, 18:00
Location: < rotor >, Volksgartenstraße 6a, Graz
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * This artistic-historical publication tells
the life story of Ivan Dynia, a former forced laborer
(“Ostarbeiter”) from the Ternopil region in Ukraine, told
from two different perspectives. On one hand through the research-based
poetry and visual art of two Austrian artists based on the tradition of
the family to which Ivan Dynia was first assigned for forced labor and
with whom he stayed after the war until the end of his life. And on the
other hand through an archive of letters he was receiving from his family
in Ukraine from the 1940s to the late 1980s.
Gernot Passath and Aio Per create a visual and
poetic story of a human life irreversibly shaped by forced deportation
to the “Third Reich” and of the unspoken sense of estrangement
experienced by Ivan Dynia’s new Austrian “family,” who
try to conceal and at the same time reinforce it with “funny”
stories and jokes about his extraordinary abilities. In contrast, the
family letters, compiled by Andrii Dostliev and framed
with historical commentary by Andrii Usach and
Anna Yatsenko (from the NGO After Silence), show the daily life
of a Ukrainian family devastated by war and their reactions to the historical
events unfolding around them over five decades — the German occupation,
the Holocaust, the Soviet occupation, resistance movements, repressions,
population ‘exchanges’ (read, forced resettlements), waves
of emigration, and even Perestroika.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * Further programme items accompanying the exhibition
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of the project co-funded by the European Union Art Space Unlimited
