Miroslav Kulchitsky & Sergey Korotun

Miroslav Kulchitsky & Sergey Korotun. “Smoking Kills”

The work is a series (a set) of three objects, which are the hand-made, “false” packs of cigarettes. Each pack reproduces the design and actual sizes of one of famous brands’ cigarettes packs – “Marlboro”, “Camel” and “Davidoff”. However, the standard warning “Smoking Kills”, which normally covers 1/3 or 1/2 of a pack, “replaces” here the brands’ names totally and becomes a “brand” itself. The idea of the work is to construct an “impossible situation”, when the only way of selling cigarettes, taking into account a possible “prohibition Law” (whose future never arrived), is to hide the actual brands under the only legal “warning” promoting the concept of “health protection”, while just giving a tip on the well-known brands’ exclusive designs. The work refers to the worldwide discussions around various prohibition laws and brings their controversial character to a focus. The sizes of the objects are identical to the ordinary cigarettes packs.