The closing night of the Kyiv Arsenale started with anarchists. A couple of guys at the entrance to the Mystetsky Arsenal were handing out leaflets with calls to resist the “bloc of capital and red tape” and waving with black and black-and-red banners. It was really gratifying, because any cultural action abroad, the Venice Biennale in particular (taking place in their local Arsenal) is always followed by protest actions of the left. So, we have our own biennale with a European spirit and our own anarchists to picket it.
While the picket was taking place at the gates, bureaucrats and capitalists were giving awards of the First International Biennale at the summer stage. British artist Phyllida Barlow became the Arsenale awards winner For the Most Significant Contribution to the Development of Contemporary Art with a cash prize of 20,000 dollars. The audience through Internet and direct voting chose three winners at once, Japanese Yayoi Kusama and Chiharu Shiota, as well as Song Dong from China (5,000-dollar cash prize each).
In the Arsenal Breakthrough Category the award unexpectedly went to two Ukrainian artists, veterans of paintings, who have been revealed both by the audience and the critics – Mykola Malyshko and Andrii Sahaidakovsky (they shared the 15,000 cash prize added to the award). Three more Ukrainian artists – Oleksandr Chekmeniov, Serhii Petliuk, and Hamlet Zinkivsky – won encouraging diplomas.
During the ceremony the curator of the Arsenale main project David Elliott said: “Phyllida Barlow has been given an award that reflects the site –specific nature of her work. She visited Ukraine, responded to the space of Arsenal and also to the environment she saw there in such a magnificent way, by creating an outmatched installation.”
Actually, Barlow’s work, which resembles a construction area by scaffold, bags thrown here and there, and remains of concrete and wooden constructions, in fact is a kind of reflection of the state of continuous repairs and reconstruction which is reigning and apparently will persist in the Arsenal for long.
The rest of the works are more refined. Several winners, in spite of their differences, were united by the desire to plan the space which would absorb the audience both in a visual and emotional way. So, the atmosphere of chimerical and uneasy dreaming is present in the work After the Dream (2011) by Japanese Chiharu Shiota. The hall filled with black threads stretched across it in all directions with a tiny pass remaining for the audience: deep inside this web several long white gowns are hanging: the work is effective, as much as it is scary. The chaos of coming back from the depth of dream up to the surface of daily consciousness, as well as threatening paradoxes of human memory, can be felt almost physically.
The absorbing and in a way a hypnotic interior was created by Yayoi Kusama, a living legend of Japanese and world’s experimental art. The visitors seemed to get into the other world where ladybirds reign: a combination of red walls, ceiling, and floor with black circles thrown here and there and red bubbles on the surface was truly impressive.
On the other hand, Wisdom of the Poor by Song Dong (2005-12, China) has a larger scale, but is expressly material. As the base for his work, Dong took rubbish accumulated by his mother for decades, starting from Mao time. By composing these old newspapers and beds, mirrors and night-tables, as well as a whole lot of other worn-out items, which you hardly notice in everyday life, he created a separate world, whose anti-aesthetics is a separate style – poetic and infernal in its own way.
Ukrainians are working in a more moderate register. Hamlet Zinkivsky (Kharkiv) is always looking to tell a story in any of his work, his creative work is expressly narrative. In Private is a huge panel consisting of drawings and inscriptions made by a ballpoint pen on identical sheets of paper, a diary where the inner and outer things cannot be distinguished, and even grammar mistakes and banalities are organic in this funny and sad biography.
Photos by Oleksandr Chekmeniov (Luhansk-Kyiv) from the cycle “Winners” are also narrations but of a different kind. The author makes photos of Ukrainian veterans of the World War II, wearing parade uniform, with complete set of awards on the chest (they are openly posing), but in their not rich apartments with hardly festive everyday life. The contrast between the shine of awards, on the one hand, and half-oblivion and poverty on the other is just the upper layer. Chekmeniov’s lens also captures numerous especially bright and typical details of the Winners’ lives. A funny picture on the wall, a jar of milk on the table, wall-paper featuring tropical landscapes, a row of corncobs in the background… Chekmeniov gives this people what politicians, state officials, and less sensitive photographers (journalists and writers) are unable to give – respect. Without unnecessary sentiments, he shows their life in a volumetric way, both its bitter and light moments; these portraits show dignity and humor rather than humiliation and indulgence.
The results of the Arsenale are far from being unexpected. The fact that it has taken place is the main pleasant surprise. Will Kyiv see the second biennale and what it is going to look like depends on the abovementioned bureaucrats, who are supposed to organize it, capitalists who fund it, and artists who will hopefully create during the coming two years a sufficient number of talented works.
