“Spyhole is a very informative detail – a lens through which the warden looked at people inside of the prison cell or walking yard. It is one of the visual communicative channels that obscured the personality of a prisoner into an isolated object of surveillance. It was a total physical and mental control of the society”.

Valentyn Odnoviun (b.Ukraine, 1987) lives in Vilnius, Lithuania and has graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Arts in Photography and Media Arts (MA) in 2016 and Art History and Theory (MA) in 2019. Currently, he has been dedicated to writing his PhD dissertation at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute. His research in Photography has been mostly linked with historical or socially engaged events and problems through the “abstract”-looking image. He said: “I work with the imagination of the viewer to create a more concrete communication with the help of interpretation and conceptual thinking”.

His project “Surveillance” consists of photographs of the walking yard and prison cell door spyholes in former political prisons in Eastern Europe – a place for political prisoners and other “unwanted” people for their dissent activities against the system.

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