Amidst the Vast Steppe
22.9 – 26.11.2023

Works of
Michal Chelbin, Sergey Melnitchenko,  Andrea Bianco

Curated by
Steve Bisson

Orari
Sunday 4:30pm–7:30pm

Lab27 inaugurates on September 22 at 9:00 PM the exhibition “Amidst the Vast Steppe”, featuring photographs by Michal Chelbin, Sergey Melnitchenko, and Andrea Bianco.
We often construct images—condensed visions—of our own landscapes. It is a way of inhabiting geography through words. This is what the poet Taras Shevchenko does in his "Testament", where he evokes Ukrainian identity through boundless fields, the roar of the Dnipro River, and that immense steppe etched by the impetuous flow of human lives and their destinies—rarely gentle, rarely fraternal. An exhibition that reflects a possible syntax of the human condition.

Starting from the photographs by Andrea Bianco, drawn from his more than decade-long social commitment in Ukraine, where he has engaged with issues of childhood, social hardship, and healthcare deficiencies. His personal journey through foster homes, orphanages, and medical facilities carries no documentary intent. Its primary goal is to assess situations, engage with people on the ground, and make choices that can never fully encompass the breadth of suffering.
Bianco’s photographs stem alongside his work with the NGO Children for Future Project, and they restore dignity to the human struggle of many individuals. They also bear witness to a kind of complicity that comes only with time—with patient immersion, attentive listening, and the trust that is so difficult to earn from those in distress.
The value of the micro-stories gathered by Bianco—and emerging both in this exhibition and in the publication “DACHA”, recognized with the Premio Editoriale Voglino—lies in this heightened threshold of attention. These are photographs as hard-won glimpses of human connection, rich with a reciprocity that is never banal and always directed toward meaning born of real experience. Moments of sincere humanity. We need them—especially in times of war.

And it is war that Sergey Melnitchenko speaks to us about—through ruins made of flesh. Snapshots of rubble tattooed onto skin. Bodies disfigured by a landscape scarred with destruction. What remains—buried in the form of memories or stretched across a collective unconscious—is what the Ukrainian photographer attempts to reveal, to bring out from the darkness of conscience, to somehow illuminate. “These are pages of history,” he tells us, “that bind people together, making them brutally alike.” Because fear, too, can be a collective feeling.
Ashes of conflict scattered across the memory of a people already battered by a decade of battles. The face of a nation that has become one with its inhabitants. “We have never been so united,” says Sergey. And then he adds that he has not yet chosen his own “tattoo.” Perhaps it will be that of Ksenia, his friend barely in her thirties, killed along with her mother by a rocket strike in Mykolaiv—his city. One among many now subjected to the same fate, the same imposition of destiny—or “superimposition,” as he might call it, referring to the technique of projecting images onto bodies that he employs. That of a land without peace.
War, then, becomes an identity solvent, and it is worth questioning the transformations it triggers within the fragile alchemy of society.

Identity is, however, also a personal endowment—certainly influenced by environmental, cultural, or social conditions, yet always distinctive of the individual. Michal Chelbin, in her travels through small villages of Eastern Europe, particularly in Ukraine and Russia, photographs performers, athletes, dancers, and dwarfs from traveling shows.
A familiar strangeness unites them, and yet—as the Israeli photographer seems to suggest—each displays a singular intimacy, character, and relational quality that seeks to seduce the observer. Each figure becomes a companion of Chelbin’s vision, whose mastery filters their exotic presence and situates it within a narrative plane, leaving the viewer free to imagine their fate. This dimension is at times dreamlike, enhanced by fairy-tale colors that often contrast sharply with the surrounding environment. Here lies the power of the individual: the ability to shed the labels of destiny or the strange order of things, to adopt behaviors that are sometimes ambiguous or not aligned with social expectations.
Chelbin’s achievement is in recognizing this evolutionary spirit—innate not only to humans but to life and biology in general. She reminds us, once again, that emotion is a driving force, and that the very catalog of feelings is an alphabet in constant evolution. History does not end here.

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