The artist Kuril Chto (literally “Smoked What”), who in his past projects has repeatedly turned to images of the typical household items that surround us in everyday life and shape our mundane reality, from chairs, ironing boards and indoor pot plants to head scratchers, has found a new hero: the washing machine that appears in a wide variety of forms, from painting on canvas and graphics to ceramic sculptures.

The washing machine has become, perhaps, the main symbol of the Russian army's invasion of Ukraine. For the soldier who has come to fight from the Russian countryside this is a luxurious trophy; for his relatives it’s a wonderful gift; for web folklore it’s a key image of the Newspeak which has appeared as a result of the “looting tour”; while for everyone else it serves an endless source of memes and jokes (the most striking of which involved helicopters flying at the Victory Parade on Red Square with washing machines suspended beneath them). What if, by means of the theft of this particular variety of household appliance, the soldiers of “unwashed” Russia are trying on a subconscious level to wash away not only the shameful stain on the entire army, but also the blood of those killed as part of the aggressive attack on Ukrainian civilians? By the power of the social unconscious, the washing machine turns not only into the paradoxical quintessence of robbery as a national idea and a sign of the imperial colonial consciousness or the desire to appropriate not only the territory of a sovereign state, but also the theft of the future from the younger generations inhabiting that country. With this artistic gesture, Kuril Chto puts washing machines on the same shelves as figurines of soldiers turned into commodities, the cannon fodder of propaganda and pawns in political games. The only thing that can unite them is not a national super-idea, but the desire to fulfill the need for basic household items and goods.

Text: Alexander Burenkov

Photo: Moritz Schermbach