At the end of November 2023, a video with the logo of a European television channel went viral on social networks, telling how a refugee from Ukraine tried to copulate with a statue. We checked if this story is real.
As reported in the report, Anna Uddenberg's sculpture "Journey to Self-Discovery" will not be exhibited in Paris - it was allegedly removed from display at the Passage de Retz gallery on the eve of the opening due to significant damage. As shown by surveillance cameras, the video claims that the sculpture lost an arm and part of a leg due to the actions of a gallery worker who, in a drunken state, imitated sexual intercourse with the statue. The culprit of the incident turned out to be 26-year-old Ukrainian citizen Valery Tarashchuk, who emigrated to France in March 2022. It also became known that Tarashchuk’s neighbor had previously complained to the police about the Ukrainian’s harassment of her 16-year-old daughter, but there was no evidence of this. At the end of the story it is said that the refugee was detained, and the artist’s representatives intend to recover €100,000 from him for the damage caused to her work.
The news was most widely spread on Telegram - in particular, thanks to the channels “The world of Mikhail Onufrienko"(240,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Russia now"(224,000), "Uncle Slava"(180,000), "First People's" (110,000) and "Petya the First"(84,000).
Sculpture "Journey to Self-Discovery"really belongs to the authorship of a modern Swedish sculptor Anna Uddenberg. This is a 2016 product repeatedly exhibited at various events such as the Berlin Biennale. The statue depicts a girl using a selfie stick to take a photo of her buttocks and crotch, and, according to the description, is dedicated to feminism and self-image.
Parisian hall Passage de Retz often hosts contemporary art exhibitions, but Verified found no evidence that Journey to Self-Discovery was planned to be exhibited there in recent months. This work is among other works by Uddenberg participates in her personal exhibition in London from October 6 to December 22, 2023.
Also, “Verified” was unable to find any evidence of a report about the incident with the sculpture on the channel euronews, as well as general mentions of the incident outside the Russian-language segment of the Network, not counting a couple of obvious cases of verbatim translation text from Russian on social networks. Note that in the channel’s reports, as a rule, used logo with a white background rather than a transparent one.
There is not a single frame in the report in which one could see the sculpture damaged. All photographs of this work used in the video have been in the public domain for several years. access on the web.
The same goes for photographs Anna Uddenberg. A shot with a plan of the Passage de Retz gallery is on the establishment’s page in Facebook, surveillance camera image can be found in Google. Footage of French law enforcement officers also appears to have been taken from publicly available videos of law enforcement activities.
“Verified” also found no evidence of the existence of a Ukrainian living in Paris named Valery Tarashchuk. The man in the video, represented by this name and surname, is in fact not a Ukrainian refugee, but a citizen of Azerbaijan Matlab Sultanov. In 2022, the Moscow City Court sentenced him to 16 years in prison for the murder of crime boss Albert Heydarov. The viral video uses footage from a story about Sultanov, which was previously broadcast on Russian television (for example, they were shown on the TVC channel).
The earliest publication with a viral video that was discovered using the TGStat service was posted on November 24 at 10:48 Moscow time in the Telegram channel “Crossbow says"(18,000 views, 263 reposts). The author of the channel is Russian satirist and public figure Ivan Kondakov, who is known for his consistent criticism of the West and the Ukrainian authorities. Soon the video began to spread in other pro-Kremlin channels.
Thus, a Euronews report was passed off as a video assembled from photos and videos previously published in the public domain. At the same time, the Ukrainian who damaged the sculpture was passed off as an Azerbaijani citizen, who is currently serving a sentence for murder in one of the Russian colonies.
Cover photo: screenshots from the video
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