UKRAINIAN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART (UMCA) is a network institution, that unites contemporary art professionals across the country and enables different audiences to meet the creative imagination of artists, ensuring a productive public dialogue about the common future.
UMCA was established by the "Museum of Contemporary Art" NGO in 2023. MOCA NGO will take care of the network’s development and collection until it becomes a legitimate part of the National Museum Fund of Ukraine. United by a common mission, values and collection, the network's autonomous chains in different cities of Ukraine interact through a digital platform that provides access to a streamlined database of Ukrainian artworks of the second half of the 20th and 21st centuries from public and private collections.
The inaugural project of the UKRAINIAN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART occurred from 31.05 to 01.07.2023 at the Ukrainian House in Kyiv.
Over the last year, 'How are you?' has transformed into a familiar manifestation of love. This question, serving as the name for the exhibition, embodies an expression of care and empathy.
It prompts introspection and fosters a sense of community as we ask it of ourselves and of each other.
HOW ARE YOU, VIEWER?
HOW ARE YOU, ARTIST?
HOW ARE YOU, WORLD?
The exhibition is anchored in The Wartime Art Archive. Since February 24, 2022, the team at MOCA NGO has been gathering art created during the full-scale Russian invasion, sourcing from social networks where artists share their works. The archive will continue until martial law in Ukraine is lifted. This chronological approach to archiving has shaped the concept of the exhibition: we envision the space of the Ukrainian House as representing different time periods experienced during the full-scale war.
We invite viewers to traverse from the present day on the 1st and 2nd floors to the initial weeks of the full-scale invasion on the 5th floor. This journey encourages visitors to recall their own experiences during these times and to engage with the artworks as records of others' states during those periods. On the return journey, time resumes its normal flow. The exhibition spans from February 24 to the present day, leading to a multitude of reflections, to the city in motion that greets you near the Ukrainian House.
Organisers:
Ukrainian Museum of Contemporary Art UMCA, established by the MOCA NGO
The memory culture platform Past / Future / Art
National Center “Ukrainian House"
Curatorial team:
Yehor Antsyhin
Olga Balashova
Halyna Hleba
Yuliia Karpets
Anna-Mariia Kucherenko
Tetiana Lysun
Kateryna Libkind
Oleksandr Soloviov
Artists:
ateliernormalno
Anatoly Byelov
Anatoly Boldyrev
Alevtyna Kakhidze
Alina Yakubenko
Andriy Rachynsky and Daniil Revkovsky
Anna Zvyahintseva
Anton Karyuk
Anton Sayenko
Bohdan Bunchak
Bohdana Zayats (my_pet_spider)
Valery Marushchak
Vasyl Dmytryk
Vasyl Tkachenko
Veronika Moll
Viktor Pokydanets
Viktoria Rosentveyg
Vitaly Kokhan
Vitaly Matukhno
Vitya Pashin
Vitya Petrunya
Vlada Ralko
Vladyslav Krasnoshchok
Halyna Nikitina
Hamlet Zinkivsky
Georgiy and Eliza Mamaradashvili
Danylo Halkin
Danylo Movchan
Danylo Nemirovsky
Darya Kuzmich
David Chichkan
Denis Salivanov
Dobrynya Ivanov
Elena Subach
Yeva Kafidova
Yevhen Klymenko
Yevhen Samborsky
Yevhen Shtein
Yehor Antsyhin
Zhanna Kadyrova
Zhenya Laptii
Igor Bondarenko
Illia Isupov
Inga Levi
Inna Kharchuk
Karina Synytsia
Katerina Aliynik
Katerina Berlova
Katerina Lybkind
Katerina Lysovenko
Katya Buchatska
Katya Lesiv
Katya Lybkind
Kostiantyn Polischuk
Kristina Melnyk
Lada Nakonechna
Leo Trotsenko
Lesya Khomenko
Lusya Ivanova
Maria Leonenko
Marina Talyutto
Masha Shubina
Mykola Babiychuk
Mykhaylo Alekseyenko
Kinder Album
Mumusical
Mykola Khylak
Nazar Bilyk
Natalia Levitasova
Nikita Kadan
Oleksandr Krizhanovsky
Oleksiy Minko
Oleksiy Say
Olena Naumenko
Olha Marusin
Olha Shtein
Pavlo Velychko
Polina Verbitska
Polina Polikarpova
Prykarpatsky Theatre
Roman Mykhailov
Roman Mykhailov and Alisa Bondarenko
Sasha Kurmaz
Sasha Roshen
Svitlana Hryb and Sergiy Spizhovyi
Sergiy Anufriyev
Sergiy Zapadnia
Tamara Turlun
Tiberiy Silvashi
Timur Tkachenko
Yulia Danilevska
Yuriy Bolsa
Yuriy Pikul
Yana Hudzan
Yana Kononova
Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimey
The project was implemented with the support of:
Swiss Confederation,
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts,
Artist at Risk Connection: ARC,
Oschadbank,
ERGO
Management of the exhibition: Tetiana Lysun
Discussion programme:
The memory culture platform Past / Future / Art
Curators: Oksana Dovhopolova, Kateryna Semeniuk
Graphic Design:
3Z Studio
Dasha Podoltseva
Public communications:
Kateryna Iholkina
Valentyna Klymenko
Olha Nosko
Mariia Khalizieva
Exhibition coordination: Alisa Hryshanova
Production agency: How production
Printing: Meteor print
Special thanks:
Volodymyr Borodianskyi
Ruslan Nonka
Kseniia Piatyhina
Ilona Shneider
The project is being organized within the framework of the Post-War Memory Culture in Ukraine (PWMC) programme, implemented by the “Museum of Contemporary Art” NGO in partnership with the Past/Future/Art Memory cultural platform with the support of Switzerland. Curators of the programme: Olha Balashova, Yuliia Hnat, Oksana Dovhopolova, Kateryna Semenyuk, Hnat Zabrodsky
PARTNERS:
“Museum of Contemporary Art” NGO,
Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine,
Swiss Confederation,
The All-Ukrainian mental health program “How Are U?”,
NGO “Barrier-Free”,
Ukraine. Out of blackout,
Artist at Risk Connection: ARC,
Ukrainian Emergency Art Fund,
Ukraine Crisis Media Cente,
Starlight Media
Information support: “United News” marathon, Radio Bayraktar, KARABAS, Kontramarka.
Creative producer of the 3D tour of the exhibition: Illia Zabolotny.
Anima is an innovative approach to mental health assessment using eye tracking technology to diagnose anxiety and depression.
Learn more and take the test at anima.ua
At the exhibition "How are you?" visitors had a chance to take this test, feeling the impact of art on their well-being.
The results of the study can be found here.
At this time, rocket attacks and blackouts continue; winter attack of Russian troops on Vugledar; heroic defence of Bakhmut; training of the Ukrainian military in partner countries. While this exhibition lasts, various things can happen, for example, our cherished collective dream will come true.
In this part of the exhibition, we celebrate the diversity of states, reсonstituted in art and curatorial texts, and their encounters. Such polyphony is far from the unity of thought and movement that we experienced last year spring. Here, the difference becomes a landscape and a field for nuances that seem more natural and closer to reality than a common thought or indivisible feeling. Initiatives, thoughts, and activities turn into mutterings of ideas, the movement of which cannot be predicted in today's changing world.
At that time, the de-occupation of the Kharkiv region and part of the Kherson region happened; the return of part of the captives, including Azov fighters, to their homes; abductions of Ukrainian children from the occupied territories to the russian federation became evident; missile attacks on Ukrainian cities; blackouts. There is no time to wait for the quick end of the war, life began to normalize in the conditions of martial law.
This floor reminds us of a museum, but it is not. The perspective with which we embarked on thinking about art in summer is present here. Such a museum perspective helps us create a comfortable space for each artwork. Therefore, for the viewer, we outline a reliable distance that provides the visibility of the artwork so that it feels independent of others.
De-occupation of parts of the Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Sumy, and Chernihiv regions happened. Evacuation trains. Cities have become volunteer centers, everyone has become a volunteer. Long curfews. Life without the ability to look back and plan something for the future.
Not intended for exposition, this floor is filled with structures to which we added our own. In this way, it becomes a closed narrow space in contrast to the other floors of the Ukrainian House. We turned it into a tunnel, or rather a corridor, where during air raids we hid the most valuable. There is a place where the ability to feel the continuity and connectivity between periods is amputated.
The beginning of the full-scale invasion. The enemy occupied the Azov region from Kherson to Mariupol and Vasylivka, the northern regions of the Kyiv region, Luhansk, Kharkiv, and Chernihiv regions, almost the entire Sumy region. The enemy attacked and shelled Kyiv, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy. Heavy fights happened on the outskirts of cities. The protection of Gostomel airport continued.
This floor is a safe place from which we witness the most terrible period, devoid of borders and time. The space is almost free of art. Own presence becomes decisive. In silence and quietness, at the point of full-scale war, we fall into the funnel and begin to overcome thick and dense time. Intimacy and reciprocity of the question "How are you?" become important, the movement towards each other unfolds.
The space of How are you? exhibition is essential for perceiving its content and meanings. It directs the movement of the viewer upwards along the spiral of the five floors of the Ukrainian House, and after climbing there is the return path downwards that makes it possible to plunge again into the saturated cacophony of time, designated by the curators here as present continuous. This idea constitutes the principle of "double exposure": scrolling the film in reverse during the ascent through the floors and seasons of the previous year until the apogee that is the 24th of February, 2022 and the first weeks, then "normal" return flow. Therefore, multiplicity is manifested on the lower floors. However, such cacophony is conscious, it is not uncontrolled chaos. The graphic island of the exposition collects, structures, and connects the noisy polyphony and variegation into a single installation field. Being in the atrium of the first floor, the one can physically feel the angular connectivity of the main exposition cells; the one can onbserve the "suprematic" dynamics and its geometric wholeness through an "eye" of a hovering drone from the circle of the third and fifth floors.
The extremity of war creates a flow of time different from the usual peaceful days. Time compresses and accelerates. Transformations happen faster, the situational status quo is utterly mobile. Everything changes: frontline reports (from the defensive actions to offensive breakthroughs and deoccuppied territories); hostile rhetoric (from "capturing Kyiv in three days" to "the president was not injured" after the drone over the kremlin); social mood after fear, terror, and anxiety; a society has believed in the inevitability of our Victory... Art could not remain aloof: at the beginning, it was in a state of short petrification and numbness, then it witnessed itself to have already changed and often asked: "How will we live after the war?" (as in one of the videos exhibited here in the atrium).
The art instantly overcame the path from direct reaction to the attempts to deepen consideration and generalization of what is going on. At first, operative and fast media, genres, and materials were on time: for instance, painting, photography, video, poster, comics, diary, found object, using of so called “unconventional” materiality. The art moves faster to the necessary distance that allows to create artworks, in which image contains not only reflection but also defamiliarization. The very perception adapts to new circumstances: what causes pain and rejection in life becomes a form in the widest range of its aesthetic categories in art, where the high is intertwined with the low, and the beautiful with the ugly.
As for the perspectives and methods of the image, visible in this part of the exhibition space, there are quite a few variations: from idealized epic and myth to strict realism; from seemingly impartial documents and diary confessions to mystifying and phantasmagoria. At the same time, the main role of acute and personal imagery becomes obvious. Professional qualities go into the shadows, and the naked individual "inner cinema" remains in the light; something that comes from the depths of the subconscious. It is no coincidence that many of the works here approach what is usually called deviant art, particularly, art brut. On the one hand, its corrupting immediacy and sincerity; on the other hand, hiddenness and different readings are a component of codes.
exhibition co-curator Oleksander Solovyov
In this room, we wanted to reveal the accumulation of thoughts and various discourses which exist in the social field at a time when even threatening circumstances grow into our daily lives and become normalised. I see now how many similarities they share and that ultimately they are about the same thing: about the earth and the semiotics which it creates. Those could be specially constructed symbols such as flags, iconic images or simply things like the writing “Children” on a fence. All of them become equivalent in the protective function assigned to them, in the way of marking the territory which we have newly realised as our own.
exhibition co-curator Tetiana Lysun
Hello! Right now you are at the How are you? exhibition, which brought together a group of curators and artists to reveal how the Ukrainian visual arts have changed since the beginning of russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The first floor of the Ukrainian House impresses with its open form and light even on the darkest day. The exhibition space is organized after a model of the complete mixing of contexts, influences, discussions, disputes, and differences.
Works closest to the current times are also present on the first floor. How is this possible? How can one create art when in seven hundred kilometers from the exhibition, Ukrainian soldiers are spilling their blood in the fight for our freedom and independence?
The new time and distance are categories that united us and changed our worldview. At once time stopped for all Ukrainians, and war stepped onto our threshold. The times we are living through together are constantly moving forward. At the same time, the fight continues: thanks to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the war is not present in everyone’s home and has moved to the defined front lines. Those gradual changes have given us the chance not to shy away from the problem, begin to work, help, and constantly try to bring the time of our victory closer.
By closely observing, attempting to feel, and remembering the changes in Ukrainian society and art, the curatorial group poses the question “How are you, viewer? How are you, artist? How are you, world?”
exhibition co-curator Yehor Antsyhin
The morning on which the “before” life was crushed under the wheels of a russian tank, which has crossed the Ukrainian border once again. This day became the starting point of a new life for Ukrainians, the beginning of continuous collective trauma, the scale of which we are currently unable to comprehend. More than a year has passed since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.
Photographs of buildings destroyed by missile strikes show something which could happen to any one of us. The distance between the bodies decreases, photographs from the de-occupied territories reveal what could have happened to each of us. Through the screens of our phones, we touch those images which will remain forever in our collective memory. Together, we live through every new tragedy which swiftly finds itself reflected in art. All words end, only images in our heads. The sound of a running generator, the noise of a HESA SHAHED 136 drone, and the sound of an explosion are heard outside the window. All images have their own sounds. Together we learn to talk about our experiences. Our voices merge into a polyphony. This is a joint search for a new language fit for a new reality.
exhibition co-curator Anna-Mariia Kucherenko
The weight of the words is staggering.
МNearly a year after, all became desperately distant and safe. The river is overflowing with the sky and grass fields. In calmness and wails, in smiles and anxious evenings of suffocation. The world is painfully comfortable. Painfully mine. Who or what will pull out its roots? The roots cannot grow in the steppes or the burnt-out earth.
An air raid siren reaches me from the loudspeaker. After 10 months of war, the only thing left is to accept it and focus on its melody. In my imagination, the siren penetrates the artery and reaches the heart. The body knows that on the inside, it is the colour of blood. The body knows that an explosion is dissecting the other body somewhere. The whimsically comforting sound of air raid sirens stirs the anxiety inside.
Letting go the rigidity that since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, we have found reliable support in archetypes and myths. Today we create new myths. The trypillian baba and cheese konyks (horses in Ukrainian) emerge in Kinder Album, Vitaliy Kohan creates cossack kleinods anew, Viktor Pokydanets visualizes the decolonisation method in relation to russian literature. Vasyl Tkachenko preserves an abstraction inherent in myths. However, the artist evades unified answers and determinism of space. Today’s new chapter cannot be closed into a whole. The May transparency of pain and thought is blooming in the world.
exhibition co-curator Yuliia Karpets
When you are learning to drive, one of the main tasks to follow is to feel the outline of the vehicle, in the same way, you feel the contour of your own body. When you move by overcoming natural abilities, you only fully become yourself if you are not equal to yourself.
The most valuable feeling each of us has experienced with the start of the invasion is a sense of belonging to something GREATER. When you can do nothing on your own, but together with others, you can do anything. The counters of your body become elusive, flexible, and mobile. They capture all of the 603,548 square kilometres. This square covers everyone who understands the question “How are you?” cannot be translated into any other language because it goes far beyond the established etiquette. This question requires an answer that can only be an echo of “How are you?”.
These nine letters (in Ukrainian it’s four) in the interrogative form are the open code of Ukrainian society. We repeat them, checking the existence of a connection. The connection arises whenever the question is addressed to some person, phenomenon, object, house or city that is close or distant, but always not indifferent to you. This exhibition is about the collective contour of our societal body, felt and realised beyond one’s own self.
exhibition co-curator Olha Balashova
We are in the now. The events of last year feel like moments of the past. Ones which changed everything, but haven’t ended yet. February, which lasted more than 365 days, had its moments of warmth as well as moments of complete darkness. In this never-ending February, we have changed and adapted to the realities of war. We did not become accustomed to them, nor have we normalised those realities, but rather adapted to them. Psychologists say that this is required to accept the current reality of war because remaining in constant tension and states of shock and stress is counterproductive in the long run.
We are learning to listen to each other, even when our views on events and situations are different. We are learning to accept the harsh reality of war.
Our current days are filled with many voices, this ruthless year of full-scale war taught us to save ourselves. To preserve our connection with reality, cherish calmness and the safety of our loved ones, to preserve the lives of our soldiers by doing whatever we can. To save art and monuments, writings and documents, confessions and evidence. To save memories. To preserve collective calmness. In this act of preserving and the vast number of such experiences, we reinvent ourselves again. Sometimes it turns into a cacophony, yet I prefer to see and perceive it as a polyphony.
Today we are collecting and archiving those experiences to later carve them into our historic memory and try to never forget.
exhibition co-curator Halyna Hleba
This exhibition spills and splashes, and only space and relation to specific time periods give its shape and direction that looks something like this:
Actually, it’s still too early for the exhibition, so it’s hard to understand anything clearly. I’m just trying to witness this archive.
Now, artists mostly push art in a primitive way, how one can push the slogan or the limb. Push towards or against each other, or wherever, just for the movement. The space warms up from this tension and pushes, starts to produce something, warms me. I find myself in a greenhouse from which I look at a vibrant city and from which everything looks alive. No, I’ve been in the greenhouse from the beginning, maybe, from the moment I agreed to participate in this project. The exhibition is an evidence of distance. If I take on such a project, I have to recognise the distance. However, now the distance is not necessary for the exhibition creation. I need at least the cheap, glued, translucent wall between me, time, and everything I need to see alive in a comfortable temperature for my thoughts, around 17°C.
Lost in the vast number of pieces and amount of work, our team seems to focus on more visible aspects of Ukranian contemporary art. Many artworks created in 2022 went unnoticed by us. We gave The main curatorial task to the time and space of the Ukrainian House. This is a safe thin slice from the surface of art. A popular exhibition with a popular name is in a popular place. It shows the walls between us and events being too thin for subtleties and conclusions.
exhibition co-curator Katya Libkind
This space arose from the need to structure the crazy reality in a form which is familiar to society. To museify experiences, images and stories. To give them air, space, and the distance of reception even when it is intentionally fake. Even when it seems that art cannot be exhibited, narrate or explore themes that were touched on before the full-scale war. Similarly, I prefer to think that we have to redefine language and imagery. However, possibly it is my/our illusion: that all the previous structures of worldview and systematically have to change completely. Perhaps, this is our cognitive distortion from the inside of the events and nothing can be like it was before. Everything is repeating, therefore, artefacts of current events (our experiences, visual images, knowledge and maybe even emotions) will also be placed in a museum one day.
The museum gives one the opportunity to observe themselves from afar and redefine the value of such experiences. It is also an instrument of self-knowledge which is absolutely crucial.
exhibition co-curator Halyna Hleba
The artworks on this floor chronologically belong to the period between the summer of 2022 and the beginning of the counter-offensive.
The shock has passed, and we have gotten used to the new reality of military law. A specific mundanity came into existence with its mandatory attribute of volunteering and supporting the army. The rear cities began to return to the pre-war life practices, reviving the almost destroyed economy. The Western partners believed that the victory of Ukraine is not only realistic but unavoidable. The space for artistic reflection appeared. Artists have returned to the game. It seemed that everything was about to end with our Victory…
The museological nature of this floor is apparent in the excess of air, the special light, the conformity of artistic statements and the scale and pathos of the institution, whose task is to preserve memory. This is the very first exhibition of the Ukrainian Museum of Contemporary Art to appear in the country that won.
It seems to be bracketed by what is presented on the first and fours floors. Since the war is ongoing, it would be a bit premature to museify it in this form. Still, it is an opportunity to peer into the future and have this image as a reference point.
exhibition co-curator Olha Balashova
During a war, a feeling is born: a moment in the present is already written down in history. Every event becomes a testimony, and fragments turn into artefacts. Nothing is secondary every detail is filled with meaning and highlights reality with additional sense.
When analysing the post-war experience of the Germans, W. G. Sebald writes “When the most horrific truth rises to the surface, … the narration quickly returns to an unobtrusive conversational tone which is blatantly at odds with the reality of the time”. Red walls which imitate a museum space should create a balanced, unobtrusive tone which sounds like a conversation about what has happened and what continues to happen. As if a safe distance which minimises the pressure of crucial importance already exists.
exhibition co-curator Tetiana Lysun
This is one of the branches of the Kyiv History Museum. When we started working with this floor, we faced that it had been brutally and chaotically transformed into office spaces that transform the floor into a strange and dangerous object. For example, in some places, there is less than 80 cm from the wall to the handrail. This space has become a counter-form to the functional room, just a remnant of something practical.
These conditions were perfect for the spring period, so we slightly emphasised the awkwardness of the space by closing this counter-form. By doing this, we limited the view of other floors and periods.
This resonates with the place I found myself in at the beginning of spring 2022. Space and time were constantly bending, twisting, disappearing, becoming something else. This experience gave me a clear understanding that I was more alive than ever before, but also a feeling that I was constantly falling out of space. What I call more alive than ever before is the effect of adrenaline.
In the spring, artists began to quickly move away from the format of Facebook posts, although it was still difficult to imagine doing something closer to art than volunteering. So I perceive many of these works as a rescue of oneself, a short stop to catch oneself in space. There are no attempts to talk about time. There is a need to literally capture it or escape from it into art.
exhibition co-curator Katya Libkind
«To grow through an artery of war in spring and tear it apart» — Kateryna Kalytko.
To reveal to yourself the shift from current reality into war and to feel the continuity on the third week. To observe its imprints in the landscape and language. Even spring hesitates between the familiar past and the threatening air of the present. In Phantoms Lusia Ivanova compares an evening cloud that transpares with the sun to a nitrogen cloud; twilight to the twilight during curfew hours; thunder to explosions.
Attempting to discern the space and its acquired features, Eliza Mamardashvili’s fleeting forest landscape is filled with black pain in the midst of blossoming. Blooming and pain is about the step into uncertainty and distance from home. To anticipate the spring in every place and to know that once again it isn’t for you.
To get lost, to continue to speak, and imagine: Valeriy Marushak finds new ways to represent the common language and images. Halyna Nikitina does not even approach distinguishable images in her watercolor applications. How can they be verbalized? There is no way. It is impossible to find any synonyms for this “no”. It renounces, but does nothing else.
An outside room becomes the inner of mine. Spacious, faded, and helpless. My shadows run through the walls. Clouds take them away at the next corner.
exhibition co-curator Yuliia Karpets
The snow of 2022 is melting away; however, we aren’t noticing the spring. Passages between train carts are narrow, and queues at the railway stations are long. Traffic is on the way out of regions. We are not used to the quick pace in which it is impossible to identify any faces. Photographs are prohibited. We are on a train in a blackout mode. We shake upon hearing air raid sirens, we began living in corridors because there is no safer place in our apartments. The categories of safety and comfort have changed. Everyone has changed their profession in the country of barricades, checkpoints, shelters, volunteers, and soldiers. You cling to the reality of a single day because you know that you cannot influence or change anything else. You are ready to dig, tie, help, and do anything for victory, so that the next day arrives. Curfew hours. DeepStateMap. Everyone wishes to have a house with a bomb shelter. We haven’t recovered yet. However, we can already work and think clearly. Art fits into a backpack. What does mobility mean to you in March 2022?
exhibition co-curator Yehor Antsyhin
In the first days of the full-scale invasion, with the accompaniment of air raid sirens and explosions, millions of Ukrainians left their homes and tried to fit all their belongings into backpacks. The government and the media began publishing instructions on the correct way to pack an emergency backpack a month before the full-scale invasion began. Their requirements – are lightness, convenience, practicality and only the most necessary objects. We were getting ready in haste, so objects were left on our shelves: a favourite book, a childhood photo, an heirloom ring... Personal belongings might not fit in a backpack which is filled with water, a first aid kit, food and warm clothing.
Ukrainians welcomed spring in winter clothes while attempting to get used to the sound of air raids. We searched for places of shelter and gave all our energy and time to volunteering. How does one silence the “phantom” air raid sirens? To visit your home only in your mind, to close your eyes and picture the details of your apartment, to see a familiar cityscape in the reportage photos from the places of bombings. New pins on a map were created forcibly, it was hard to call a temporary shelter a home, maybe only a foreign one. Although, the scotch crosses on the windows make any cityscape seem familiar. Are there any safe places in Ukraine? The collective tragedy touches us all, we make a step towards each other, unite once again and try to adapt to a new life. With the hope for a future.
exhibition co-curator Anna-Mariia Kucherenko
Cyanotype, flag fabric.
2022
Obrus (tr. from Ukrainian tablecloth).
Ballpoint pen on textile.
2022
Supra is a traditional Georgian feast, the ritual of unity of those sitting at the table. Supra is never complete without a tablecloth that covers, hides and protects the table, protecting everyone at the table. Obrus is a tablecloth used mostly for holidays in Ukraine.
The work was created with the artist's father before their trip to Sakartvelo – the homeland of Heorhii, which he hadn’t visited for 24 years. During the week, Eliza and Heorhii discussed a tablecloth and a table as a space of unity. Their conversations resulted in the creation of a common tablecloth, reflecting war times, pain, and memories of places and pain in Sakartvelo, the same enemy.
Lullaby 8.
Graphite pencil, digital print on paper.
2022
CE NE BORŠČIVNYK (This is not a hogweed)
Object, embroidery on plastic bag.
2022
TURBO VOJNA (Turbo War)
Object, embroidery on plastic bag.
2022
War Secret.
2022
The War Secret project was created after the beginning of the full-scale russian invasion. One can anonymously send their secret, which appeared after the 24th of February, and become a part of a collective art project. The secret can be about fear, longing, hope, anxiety or joy. The main requirement is sincerity.
Double Exposure series.
Pencil on paper. 2022
Double Exposure is a graphic series that Inga Levi started on the 26th of February, 2022, two days after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The artist will continue this artwork until the Ukrainian victory. The title is borrowed from the photographic term double exposure – the layering of two images. Each piece depicts two realities: the war and everyday life in the cities where Levi stayed at that particular moment.
Resistance Movement.
Installation. 2022
Video, 10 min.
2022
Installation.
Video documentation of the performance 2 min, tablet, armature, metal wire, clay.
2022
Video documentation.
2023
Volodymyr Nevidomyi lives in a psychoneurological internat (center for disabled citizens) in Pushcha-Vodytsia. Volodymyr is focused more on collecting, rather than creating art. He never leaves his archive, where one can find not only drawings but also medical prescriptions, someone’s awards, packages, a small book by Rilke, a beret, and parts of someone else's diary. In such form, Volodymyr’s archive can be seen only once, as it moves and transforms all the time. Volodymyr constantly adds new finds in it or loses something from it, so the archive is never too big, and you can take it with you anywhere.
Video, 7 min.
2022
In his meditative video work, the author combines footage of the Lithuanian resort of Palanga, known for its nudist men's beach, with images of a similar place in a resort near the Ukrainian town of Simeiz. After the occupation of the Crimea peninsula, the artist’s memories of Simeiz remained in ghostly feelings and a few photographs.
The northern and southern resorts were «places of increased male sociability and circulation of information about homosexual relations, where men acquired their first tangible knowledge of sexual coding. They provided new ways of self-organisation and caused various developments in society that managed to escape the strict Soviet rules. Eventually, they led to the formation of organisational activity that is happening today.»*
*Augustas Čičelis. Reading Between the Lines: Spatial Communities of Man With Same-Sex Attraction in Late 20th Century Lithuania. Gender Studies at Central European University.
Video, 35 min.
Lviv, 2023
Mumusical is a vocal-participatory action, which takes place based on the volunteer initiative Kukhnia-Lviv and the Pidsoma shelter. With the beginning of the full-scale russian invasion, the dance center Soma.majsternia turned into a shelter and a place to prepare food for those in need. A year later, temporarily displaced persons of all ages continue to live in the walls of the old book factory. The arrangement of the shelter by IDPs and activists was accompanied by a consistent «beautification» of the shared everyday life. The culmination of this process was an artistic residency-musical, that was possible with the support of European institutions (Baltic Art Center, Milvus Artistic Research Center, Swedish Institute). The List of Improvements, sung by the musical participants, questions the ratio of the necessary and the excessive, the very dynamics of international solidarity. The self-defenсe skills that Volodymyr, an IDP, teaches in one of the stories serve as a lesson in productive aggression. Temporarily displaced persons and artists share dreams and memories, make wishes, and prepare food in constant uncertainty. Finally, musical shapes as a concert of greetings, a series of empathetic messages between different locations, generations, and types of experiences.
Participants of the musical: Dmytro Tkalenko, Tamara Tkalenko, Oleksandr Pylypeko, Olena Mordyk, Katia Libkind, Dymetrii Starkgard-Venier, Volodymyr Pylypenko, Myro Klochko,
Oleksii Minko, Iryna Loskot, Tomash Hazhlinski, Larion Lozovyi, Tonia Zelenina.
Curated by Olha Marusyn.
Video, 14 min.
2022
Film-essay about the forms of memory. Participants Oksana Leuta and Kateryna Yakovlenko. Created for Land to Return, Land to Care laboratory for artistic research on war experiences.
Video, 3 min.
2022
Video, 2 min.
2022
Video, 4 min.
2022
Video, 2022-2023
Video, 75 min.
2022
– the visual image of Lysychansk city, Luhansk region, made from archival footage found by the TV channel Aktcent.
Through the channel's narrative and conditions, in which the archival footage was found, the film creates a surreal picture of the city that tries to ignore its problems and lives in a distorted reality. And at the same time, the city seems to be preparing for a new collapse.
The film’s characters often talk about the future, expressing their hopes or dreams, but they have not yet met the future that will come with destruction and a sense of abandonment.
The film’s structure contains of two parts:
The first part shows the past through the lens of the Aktcent TV channel. These materials are in the foreground. They were created in 4:3 format, as all the videos were made on old VHS tapes.
The second part takes place between 2014 and 2022 and is set in the background. This is our present and the future that has already come for the city, where we see complete devastation due to the war in Ukraine and the deindustrialisation of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. These processes began in the 90s, but their effects became particularly noticeable in the 2010s.
The building of the TV channel "Aktcent" is also visible in the background as of 2019. The background is set to a 16:9 aspect ratio.
Video, embroidery.
2022
This is an attempt to explain why I began to eat meat in 2022 after being a vegetarian for 10 years.
Installation.
Video Andrii Lysetskyi.
2022
17 April 2022.
The 53rd day after the full-scale invasion.
After entering the building destroyed by russian rocket, Mykhailo Alekseienko met the owner of apartment No. 14, whose number matched the number of the apartment where he lives. There, he found children’s paints and a broken crystal service. Using the paints he found, the artist began to paint over the glass fragments with his fingers. The apartment owner allowed him to take these things. Already in the studio, the artist illuminated the crystal, the shadow from it resembled shell fragments, which he also painted.
Video, 7 min.
Music by Nikita Moiseev.
2022
Video, 10 min.
2022
This video work is intended to show the fragility of the sky and the fear of looking at it inherent to people with traumatic experiences. The compilation of founded footage presents the sky with the daily cycle: morning, afternoon, evening, night, morning. This is the sky over Ukraine in various states, before and during the russian-ukrainian war. The end of the video is the sun close up, similar to an explosion of a hydrogen bomb. The sound of the video is the Russian military frequency 4625. One can hear the voice of a man who in Russian calls numbers and names without any meaning. There is one version that frequency 4625 is part of the Perimeter nuclear complex. A complex for automatic control of a massive retaliatory nuclear strike, created in the USSR at the height of the Cold War and used by Russia.
Digital images.
2022
Video, text.
2022
I wake up every few hours amidst any kind of activity. Half-a-day barrages of catharses. Half a day of nothing. The thought does not let me alone that we are in some veteran’s recurrent nightmare, that they’ve slipped us a trauma that is not at all our own. Some dudes decided to create a reconstruction—with the same words, ideas, instruments, movements—a kind of game they’re using to displace what happened to them in WW2 and after. That the “great Russian nation” just needs to win the war again to forget that they’ve long been killed and repressed. Or maybe they feel that death is the only truth in their lives, and that’s why they so eagerly hurl their bodies at us, pressing to feel something a little real.
Time is arrested and deeply shocked.
I pray to materiality and to reality.
On the third day of the war, I felt fear creeping up to me, that kind of fear that, they say, makes your limbs go numb. I went out into the garden, lay down on the ground, and the earth went through me, through my tremor, and made me dead and invincible. I discovered that the only thing left from the fear now was its power. My body heats up and strobes like it’s getting ready to melt the world. I understand that the coerced freedom of humanity will begin with Ukraine. Everything that was, has gone to shit and will now grow again from this broken but very living and luminous center.
The butterfly in the video is Idea leuconoe. I bought her chrysalis and eagerly awaited the triumphant appearance of this sex machine, eagerly awaited her live beauty, and somehow attached too much importance to her arrival. A week before the war, she hatched; her belly was damaged, one wing was fully crumpled, the others she just couldn’t unfold. She tripped over her feet and tried to flap her soft wings for two more days. I fed her and wept over her like I have not yet wept over this war. My entire life coalesced in this unsymmetrical broken mandala. Everything that happened and everything that is possible will only be like this butterfly. Nothing more alive could have emerged for me. This is that center from which I now continue.
Video, 6 min. Sound design Ivan Skoryna & Bohdan Bunchak.
2022
Video, 9 min.
2022
Created during the Residency about the Future in Asortymentna Kimnata.
Video, 40 min.
2022
Investigating invasive plants for approximately 10 years, Kakhidze looks at the nature of the invasiveness of plantage through the lens of peoples’ military riots, particularly, russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The artist wrote the play in which plants talk, and some people join. All members of the Zoom meeting discuss coexisting in the neocolonial world where plants can be victims and invaders, as well. Creation of the play was commissioned by Botanical Witnesses the 8th biennale Artishok in Tallinn.
Installation.
Gouache on paper, video, 13 sec on tablet.
2022