EXHIBITION: BOIKO by Jan Brykczyński in Hamburg
Robert Morat Gallery,
Kleine Reichenstraße 1
20457 Hamburg
Those Boikos are the most mysterious tribe the length and breadth of the Carpathians. No-one else is quite so troublesome. The Boikos are a little mute. They are incapable of talking about themselves. They, like the Germans1, don’t call themselves Boikos. They consider Boikos an insult. They call themselves: Verkhovynians, Rusyns, Galicians, but not Boikos. They might agree to the name Boikivshchyna for where they live, but not a single one of them knows the limits of its territory.
They are so vivid, when you are among them, yet become slippery, like their waters, when you try to somehow define them.
You can’t get by without Boikos if you’re making a film about old times, whether it’s the middle ages or the middle of the twentieth century. In any case, their faces are not from around here. And neither is their way of life. In each detail one detects more of past centuries than present fashions. They have so many objects and gestures that have disappeared everywhere else, and they have so little of everything that is already everywhere.
An extract from a text by Taras Prokhas’ko, transl. Uilleam Blacker
1 Untranslatable pun: (Ukr.) німі - німці [nimi - nimtsi]: (Eng.) mute – German
Boiko villages in the Ukrainian Carpathian mountains perfectly sum up my idea of rural life in all its primeval form. There I found myself in a world where events have magical causes, where white magic confronts black magic, and good struggles with evil - in a world I knew only from the fairy tales I was told as a child.
The BOIKO project was photographed by Jan Brykczyński between 2009 and 2012 in the village of Karpatskoye in Lviv province in western Ukraine. Boiko is the name of the ethnic group that inhabits the western part of the Ukrainian Carpathian mountains. http://www.janbrykczynski.com/boiko/
The book BOIKO was self-published by the author in 2014.
Jan Brykczyński (b. 1979) is a photographer who often focuses on European rural regions in his work as well as on the complex relationship between man and nature. In 2014 he published his first book, BOIKO on rural life in the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains followed by The Gardener, published in 2015 by Dewi Lewis. Jan’s work has been exhibited in collective shows in Deichtorhallen, the Noorderligcht Gallery and in the Musée de l'Elysée. He is a founding partner of the Sputnik Photos collective.
http://www.janbrykczynski.com
