Phantasmal Gallery
Phantasmal Gallery
Julia-Anna Simonchuk
Mildmay Series
2023
Photography​
The series of photographs is capturing a joyful, alluring and yet somewhat eerie and haunted atmosphere of a swing dance social at the Mildmay Working Men’s Club in Newington Green, London, where I used to be a regular for more than a year. Although through glimpses and fragments, these images are indirectly attempting to narrate a story of friendships and ambiguous relationships, openness and secrets, desire and anxiety, the community and individuals; of the motion through stillness; of looking and being looked at and of escapism and inability to escape. The lighting in Mildmay’s ballroom makes an experience of being and dancing in this space quite cinematic. The characters melt into the dense darkness of the background, arise from nowhere, their bodies morph and merge - it all gives an oneiric quality and mimics other subjective phenomena such as memory or fantasy.
A Little Bit About The Artist
A Statement From The Artist
I’m a London-based artist originally from Kyiv, Ukraine. I graduated from BA Fine Art course at CSM and am currently finishing a Fine Art MA at the Slade.
I'm working with sculpture, collage, installation, printmaking, socially-engaging projects and moving image but currently I’m focusing on moving image.
Among my thematic interests are questions of power, ideology, memorialisation, decolonisation, hauntology, multitemporality and social dancing. My practice is informed by research into history as well as personal experiences of witnessing history-in-making. The focus is on the urban and the natural landscapes in relation to ideology, specifically - architecture under totalitarian regimes. I am engaging with the conversation around Soviet monumentalism and the approaches to its demonumentalisation in my home country – Ukraine. I am looking at these themes in conjunction with the concept the uncanny.
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What is your favourite movie or Tv Show?
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My all time favourite film is delicate and meditative 'The Wings of Desire‘ by Wim Wenders. One of the best films about time, history and experience of being human. It is grounded in a certain time and place. It is full of reflections on the past, particularly WWII and about modern time (1980s) Berlin, but at the same time it is being beyond time and place. I love the idea of angels in this film - invisible observers who have always been around; their knowledge of human nature is immense, they have witnessed everything but can never apply all that knowledge — only observe, subtly intervene but never act, never live and experience themselves. Another film that influences me a lot is the Shining — especially the Gold Ballroom Scene. The building of the hotel is a place beyond time and in a way is an organism that is given a subjectivity, where the past that is never fully gone and haunts the present. In my practice I’m also interested in the idea of a site and oftentimes conflicting co-existance of the past and present that certain buildings and landscapes contain in them.
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What's is your biggest influence for your practice?
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Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Mark Fisher, Susan Sontag.
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If you could be any movie character who would you be?
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’d like to be Agent Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks. I wish I could trust my intuition the same way as he does. Plus Cooper is courteous, stylish, always collected and is doing something meaningful. I always wanted to be a bit more useful for the community. If I was Cooper though, I’d probably choose not to work for the US government.
