Maksym Khodak was born in 2001 in Bila Tserkava , not far from Kyiv. He lives and works in Kyiv. About the video-sketch 'Screen Recording, 13:20, 7 April 2023.MOV', which he contributed to Artists about War, the artist writes:
"So the work explores the perspective of 'war from the tablet', which is a usual tool for drone operators among soldiers nowadays in war. On the right half of the screen, I play a silly game, that recreates the interface of loitering munition, where I'm destroying a digital copy of the Russian army. The left side is showing a stream of the TikTok videos uploaded by soldiers to the platform, which documented their everyday life in a playful form. The last part is a FaceTime window with my face in the upper right corner where I read out loud some excerpts from a novel "A Sentimental Tale" by the Ukrainian writer Mykola Khvylovy. In my opinion, the chosen fragments translate the experience of the people who were forced to leave the country due to the war. As the main hero of this book arrives at some unknown place called Z, from today's perspective evokes associations with the Russian army as they constantly Z as a symbol of their army. These elements create for me together some sort of neurotic perception of the war, where you have too much to handle at the same time, and your brain starts to be constantly overwhelmed. Some sorts of FOMO (fear of missing out), attention span shortage due to the first TikTok war, as it was called by some Western magazines a year ago."
Maksym Khodak, Email from 16. April 2023.
