You Shouldn't Have to See This

In their new work, Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei filmed Ukrainian children who were deported to Russia and later returned to Ukraine.

Russia has been deporting children from Ukraine to its territories since 2014, since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Estimates of the numbers of such cases range from 20,000 to over one million. Malashchuk and Khimei draw attention to this war crime and at the same time portray childhood during the war.

Importantly, in the digital age, many people can witness wars and other tragic events through images. The act of observation can lead to a false sense of involvement, or a form of satisfaction derived from the esthetic qualities of the images. Authors often take advantage of this and violate the boundaries of privacy.

In their work You Shouldn't Have to See This, the artists problematize this conflict of representation. Every such image is primarily evidence of a crime, and only potentially a work of art (which should never have been created).