Nataliya Ilchuk
Marché

The exhibition Marché reflects the situation in Ukraine where work is not a strictly regulated activity. Work, neither protected nor guaranteed by the state, serves rather as a means to surpass a social reality — defined by numerous obstructions — through the discovery of ways to avoid submission to authority in the search for self-realization in order to preserve one's freedom when values beyond money come into play. Such efforts — having hardly been diminished over what is an extended period of time within a context of global transition and crisis — require a certain level of creativity.

The industry worker is obliged to produce systematically, constrained to automatisms that become evident as a result of monotonous activity and dependence on machines. The worker as a creative actor in society is not unlike an artist maneuvering between rules legislated by the powers that be, navigating a life/work balance that rarely exists as a delible line: life often becomes the subject of work and vice versa. Although Marché focuses its perspective narrowly, addressing the situation of Ukrainian industry workers traveling abroad for employment opportunities, it implies the broader implications of this situation as it can be observed in other countries, each with its particularities both within and without the realities of active hostile conflicts.

Nataliya Ilchuk works predominantly in the medium of film and video. She was born in Lviv in 1985. Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. She graduated from Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains in France in 2020 after having studied cinema in Kyiv, Ukraine and Warsaw, Poland. Since autumn 2022 she is a PhD candidate at CY Cergy Paris University,France where she is currently developing an artistic research thesis in the form of an auto-ethnography. Her research explores the limitations of artistic freedom while attempting to establish links between authenticity in cinema and the numerous forms of external and internal pressures with particular attention to censorship and self-censorship.