Month: May 2022

Monsters’ Castle, Odesa. 2021

Artists:Archive of Public Protests collective (Poland), Shailo Djekshenbaev (Kyrgyzstan), Sergiy Shabohin (Belarus), Gohar Sargsyan (Armenia), Piruza Khalapyan (Armenia).

An exhibition and research of social and political transformations in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc that happened or became relevant in 2020.

Last Year was difficult not only because of Covid-19 pandemic but also because many countries of the world faced a range of escalated protests and armed conflicts. For the last 20 years countries of the former USSR underwent dynamic social and political changes. One of the main reasons is the formation of young states (due to the fall of the USSR) and new identity. The machinery of government and the society found themselves on different levels just as tectonic plates that are moving with different speeds. Government officials tend to more traditional mechanisms of work while civil society already exists in the context of global processes and needs other approaches respectively. Different approaches and views provoke communication in different forms, including petitions, protests, art, etc.

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Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv, 2019

Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit was a Hutsul painter, folklorist, ethnographer, philosopher, and photographer. She lived a solitary life in the Carpathian village Kryvorivnia and has become one of the cultural symbols of this place and the whole Hutsul region. However, the artist remains little known to the general public. Paraska created her own microcosm existing on the verge of truth and fiction where reality intertwines with the mystical so closely that they cannot be separated. Her life was a difficult path of trials where Paraska managed to keep her trust in people, embrace the philosophy of love, and learn to travel through art without leaving her village.

The exhibition Overcoming Gravity at Mystetskyi Arsenal is a journey through the world of spiritual images, fairy-tale texts, ethnographic notes, fictional landscapes, and documentary photographs.

Photos Chernichkin Kostyantyn

The Latvian Museum of Photography, Riga. 2019

Artists:Roman Pyatkovka, Valeriy Miloserdov, Sasha Kurmaz, Mila Teshaieva, Sergiy Melnichenko, and Myhailo Palinchak.

In the discourse of a given historic epoch, body and corporality have always represented social and cultural processes taking place in a particular historical period. The history of the body, or problematizing of the categories of body, corporality, and sexuality, reflected major cultural, political, and economic trends. The history of the body is the history of an epoch.

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Mala Gallery of Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv. 2017

A white sheet of hopes and an imposed persuasion of ideal existence are one of the signs of the Lost Territories, or state systems engendering phantoms—simulacra of reality.

Jean Baudrillard compares a map of a territory with the territory itself—with the original. He says that a map (as a simulation) is no longer a simulation of the territory, but a synthesized model of a real without origin or reality. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. To simulate means to pretend that you have something you do not really have. The simulation calls into question the distinction between “true” and “false,” between “real” and “imaginary.”

Thus, new content forms old systems. A path to an ideal system of existence goes through the creation of illusions on the social level or in everyday life, through belief into new images and symbols which results, sooner or later, in the collapse of the system, the images, and the ideas.

This exhibition brings together works that reflect the idea of forming an ideal social space, cast doubt on the long-term viability of utopian systems, and visualize transformations in the former Soviet states.

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Suwon Photo Festival, South Korea. 2016

Artists: Arnis Balcus (Latvia), Andrejs Strokins (Latvia), Maxim Dondyuk (Ukraine), Oleksandr Chekmenev (Ukraine), Shilo Group (Ukraine), Vitaliy Fomenko (Ukraine), Sergey Hudzilin (Belorus).

Since the 1990s, each country found itself in the context of the formation of a new, independent identity and a new development path. The Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) managed to break ties with Russia more quickly and join the European Union, although the establishment of geographical borders was not a decisive factor in changes, and collective memory is still shaping visual links with the past.

The exhibition presents the works of eight authors from Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania—eight series of stories about the changes taking place in these countries and the external factors forcibly changing the forms and the borders of “independent” states. 

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