Alina Kleytman

There is already something pornographic about following wars at a safe distance, and Alina Kleytman’s cycle of short films takes that quality to an extreme. Her satire spares neither the performers nor the voyeuristic audience, revealing the perverse economy behind what passes as empathy. In Kleytman’s theater of the absurd, solidarity is repackaged as a series of consumer demands.

Becoming a trench camgirl, a latex-bound dominatrix interrogator, and a screaming “Baby Democracy,” the artist acts out the bizarre expectations Western audiences project onto Ukrainian bodies. In the first film, the camgirl solicits donations from European “daddies” for a wishlist of Leopard tanks and toothpaste. The second mocks the accusations hurled at those who fled the war as a sadomasochist transaction. In the final act, a demanding “Baby Democracy” throws tantrums—and feces—at a “coalition of the willing” that rewards her regardless.

Alina Kleytman (1991, Kharkiv, Ukraine) is an artist whose work across sculpture, video, and performance unravels the erotics of power, the poetics of trauma, and the intimacy of control pushed to the edge of absurdity. Dark humor often underpins her work, turning provocation into a tool for destabilizing moral and emotional certainties. Her work has been shown in institutions such as Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; Radvila Palace Museum of Art, Vilnius; and Museum Folkwang, Essen. Kleytman received the 2021 Women in Arts Award and twice won the PinchukArtCentre Prize. She lives in Vienna.