2024
video
5:14 min
PLACE TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE (2024), transforms war-torn Kharkiv into a grotesque tourist destination. A promotional-style voiceover invites viewers to visit destroyed buildings and mass graves, reframing sites of trauma as landmarks of fascination.
At the center of the film is DIRTY WHITE, Kleytman’s gender-neutral alter ego—“victim and fool”—played by the artist herself. Dressed in rags and clownish makeup, Dirty White acts as a mythical sponge for collective hatred and despair, a messianic mascot designed to absorb emotional waste. Born in 2022 “against their will,” the character reflects Kleytman’s fascination with the endless shine of human violence—a radiant horror that refuses moral closure.
By merging dark absurdism with raw documentation, the work exposes how violence is aestheticized and consumed. Kleytman’s use of parody and spectacle sharpens her critique of war, trauma, and the commodification of suffering, continuing her broader exploration of power, mythology, and the visual language of catastrophe.
Here, “dirty whiteness” refers to the fractured ideal of universal humanism—its history of denial, domination, and moral blindness. Through grotesque humor and unbearable intimacy, Kleytman confronts the viewer with complicity: what does it mean to watch, and who profits from the spectacle of pain?
Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst ’24
text by Ekaterina Degot
Alina Kleytman’s new film parodies a promotional tourist video. Her gender-neutral protagonist, Dirty White Victim and Fool, sells tours to the artist’s home city of Kharkiv. Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kharkiv has often been and still is close to the frontline, under fire and under siege. Filming there in 2024 was as difficult as it was dangerous.
In the film, Dirty White—dressed in rags and painted with garish makeup—proudly advertises an apartment in a semi-destroyed building, or one of the many new cemeteries that had to be built for the victims of the war. The character of Dirty White first emerged in Kleytman’s world in 2022, “against their will,” as the artist says. They are obsessed with the “endless shine of human violence” and bring different sorts of it into the spotlight. The “dirty whiteness” refers to the deep flaws of universal (“white”) humanism and its history of murder and torture.