When we look at the images of military officers languorously posing in gestures of staged repose placed next to advertising from fashion
magazines, we may simply assume a purposeful juxtaposition clearly
alluding to a mimicry that speaks of the perversity of power. However, these are not mere military officers neutrally staged in a visual game of war versus dollar. They are members of an elite brigade responsible for the gross error of striking a passenger flight over the Crimean
peninsula during military exercises. The project rendered by artists Iliya Chichkan and Piotr Wyrzykowski speaks of a more complicated notion of fetish that reverberates between Marxian and Freudian interpretation.
Their project including photographs and video documentation extends beyond a bracketing of a prototypical ‘look,’ evoking staged fashion
photography implicit to advertising. The coded images allude to a
discourse of desire immersed in the fetish as instigating an invisible movement that is almost physical in nature, be it in the purchase of the commodity and the circulation of goods and hence money. Both point to systems of harbored secrets and illusions structured in the name of survival, be that in psychic terms, within protectorates of ideology. The Prada mule or the ballistic missile share an existence as enigmatic objects that are sensuous, suprasensible, and social. They are a fetish that displaces ideology in creating a necessary reality, but one that is nevertheless constructed and illusory.
— Marta Kuzma

Selected group exhibitions and performances: 2002: Matrix of Collaboration, CCA, Kiev; Lounge Screening, MOMA, New York; Freiheit/Unfreiheit, Rebell Minds, Berlin; Art.ificial Emotions, ITAU Center, São Paulo; Art in Public Spaces, Kunsthalle, Vienna; 2001: In Between: Art from Poland, Culture Center, Chicago; InvAsia, Molodawia; KIMAF, Kijiow; 2000: Scena 2000, Center of Contemporary Art, Warsaw; WRO 2000, Wroclaw; After the Wall, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Simple Life, Media Kunst, Edith-Russ-Haus, Oldenburg.