About the Works

I have been working on a project addressing social aspects such as human conformity, manipulation, pretence, and sincerity. These concepts surround us with varying intensity forming the cores of ideological movements, religious societies, and cults. The driving force behind this project was the activity of a UFO-centered Raëlian movement. The key pursuits of the movement are: raising funds for the construction of the embassy to return the aliens (who created people) to Earth, cloning people, the practice of Sensual Meditation, and provision of sex services by a separate unit of so-called Raël's Girls. In 2002, the society leader told the world that they managed to clone the first child, a girl named Eva. Unfortunately, her existence has not been proven. Today, according to various estimates, the total number of followers is about 300,000 people worldwide.

I was taken by the ability of people faced with estrangement in modern society, to find some kind of transcendence in such cults. Working with a lot of material, I decided to interpret the experience in a visual narrative. I create and utilise sculpture, and work with photogrammetry and 3D printing. In this part of the project, the attention is focused on unsuccessful experiments, the process of creating a clone, fear, masturbation, and sexual context. The series is a reinterpretation and my illustration of a world in which sexual emancipation and sci-fi interpretation of the Bible coexist. The created entourage is the decoration of an imaginary shelter that manipulatively attracts with its utopianism. Photography, in this case as a medium, assumes the authenticity of the depicted, but, at the same time, occupies an average position between the authenticity of the depicted and the genuineness of its essence.

Valentyn Bo