Alla Tkachuk came to London in 1989 as a political refguee from the Soviet Ukraine, her imagination and perception of the world dominated by her life under totalitarian regimes. 'My artistic sensibility is for ever tied to the past. At seven I was punished for touching Lenin's nose, as a teen forced to write false Komsomol meetings reports, as a student I spent time in the KGB's freezing rooms. My relatives were persecuted by Stalin; my parents investigated; amongst those killed by Nazis are my two grandfathers.'
Her imagination, unlike those of children in the west for whom the overriding cultural images are of Hollywood actors, pop stars and brands such as Coca-Cola and Disney, was dominated by the iconic personalities of dictators and Party apparatchiks. The images that were common currency when Tkachuk was a child during the zastoi Brezhnev period were of sinister and impenetrable Party congresses, Brezhnev and other Party leaders, the black-uniformed SS and still brutal scenes of WWII.
After coming to London Tkachuk studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and Guildhall University, and in 2001 was appointed Artist-in-Residence at Queen Mary College, University of London. It was here that she embarked on a series of paintings of 20th-century dictators: Hitler, Stalin, Mussollini, Mao and Franco. In the project, sponsored by The Leverhulme Trust, Tkachuk wanted to depict the defining figures of her childhood, fusing her own experiences with history and the politics of the last century, and painting them in a contemporary way which would have been an anathema at the time.
By choosing to paint these dictators in the nude Tkachuk poses questions about public and private identity - stripped of his uniform is Hitler enfeebled, shamingly exposed? - and she also raises the old question of how an ordinary man, with a body like yours and mine, could have led and executed one of the greatest atrocities in human history.
Tkachuk is currently translating this series of paintings into 3D digital format, introducing animation, real-time interaction and sound. From November to January 2007 the series will be shown in animated format as a video banner on Europe's largest LED screen, ot the top of the Axel Springer building in Berlin.
Rebecca Wilson
To find out more about Alla Tkachuk click here.
We Have Not Stoped Dancing Yet, 2006
Hitler, 2004
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