No Panic

This series of twelve ink drawings examines the mechanisms of propaganda and the rationalization of violence in the context of Russia's war against Ukraine.

The point of departure is the Russian mobilization propaganda campaign "Bez Paniki" ("Don't Panic"). In posts published by pro-war bloggers, mobilized soldiers were represented as the equivalent of the 1% ingredient listed on packages of candy or cosmetic products — a negligible fraction standing in for society as a whole. Through this rhetoric, death was framed as a marginal systemic cost: a single individual removed from the mass, stripped of significance and visibility.

"The Russo-Ukrainian war" has two defining characteristics that are central to this body of work. First, it is the first war in which drones and drone footage have become a primary means of observing and documenting combat. Second, the widespread use of drones by both sides has enabled a form of "precisely controlled destruction," making it possible to record the process of death itself. Much of this footage depicts severely wounded soldiers abandoned on the battlefield, with little or no prospect of evacuation or survival — often left behind by their own comrades.

Within this reality, the soldier is reduced to expendable material, paying with his life for the decision to serve a totalitarian system.

The drawings depict the moments immediately preceding a soldier's suicide at the front, viewed from the perspective of a drone. This visual strategy adopts the aesthetics of surveillance and technical observation characteristic of contemporary warfare, in which images function as instruments of management, control, and the neutralization of responsibility. The human figure is reduced to an operational entity — a target within a field of vision, a unit of data.

Each drawing is based on a specific documented video recording of an actual event. Rather than reconstructing individual biographies or motivations, the series investigates the threshold moment as the outcome of a larger system: the convergence of propaganda, technology, and political decision-making. Suicide is presented not as an isolated personal act, but as the logical consequence of a system in which individual life has lost its value and violence has been absorbed into the order of rationality.

The work was presented at the Survival Art Review (Przegląd Sztuki Survival) in June 2026, in the space of the former Clinic of Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases in Wrocław. Responding to the festival's theme, A Finger in the Heart, the series explores the idea of an instrument of intervention detached from both the body and ethics. The drone, like a medical instrument or a scientific measuring device, becomes an extension of power, producing knowledge that appears neutral while actively participating in processes of objectification and destruction.

This series is a direct continuation of the project Reverse Perspective, which examined the consequences of the absence of a Renaissance phase in the development of the culture of the Muscovite state and the corresponding absence of key humanist traditions, resulting in the systematic suppression of individual agency reproduced by the state to this day.