Did you know...?

Did you know that ...Little Liars "was the name of radio receivers in Soviet Union that would receive only a certain government-approved frequency (the same formula was used in North Korea.) You could listen to “Voice of America” in USSR, but mere exposure to an opposite side of propaganda had tragic effects as well: a number of guerrilla fighters stayed for many years with radio receivers in forests of USSR-occupied countries like Lithuania waiting for “Americans to come.”

(Cited from Raimundas Malasauskas, text for Plug in 28, Van Abbe Museum)

Little Liars (collection from Kyiv, models 1-9), consists of nine unique bronze casts of one-channel radios, collected by Bik Van der Pol at flee-markets and from private persons during a residency in 2007 in Kyiv. 'Little Liars' was the (nick)name of these radio receivers in the Soviet Union, that would receive one single frequency controlled entirely by the state. Usually installed in the kitchen, they had to be part of every Soviet household, and were the only source of information about events in the Soviet Union and the rest of the world. As part of their continuous research on how knowledge affect a community or society, Bik Van der Pol investigated how information about the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl was disseminated to the public, and how the events following this event have implanted and continue to manifest in the private and public life of Ukraine.

In the casting process one single duplicate is cast from an original object. The original, the mould, is destroyed to remove the cast item, while every detail, inscription, mark, or structure, is conserved in the bronze, a material that is traditionally used to cast monuments and public sculptures.