A renewed exposition of selected works by Ukrainian and foreign artists from the center’s “Collection Platform 2: Circulation” will draw immense attention of art connoisseurs. The most famous names include legendary Banksy (with a sarcastic print Lenin on Rollerblades) and Borys Mykhailov (with a whole series of photos), as well as Chuck Close, Marc Quinn, Lisa Lou, Takashi Murakami, Thomas Ruff, Richard Phillips, Olesia Khomenko, Vasyl Tsaholov, etc. An exhibit of Oleksandr Roitburd’s works under the overall title “If there is no water in the tap” will be opened within the framework of PAC-UA, meant for Ukrainian artists.
Indisputably, the main events are the exhibit of 20 nominees for the PinchukArtCentre Prize (selected from 1,100 people) and the solo project of the Brazilian artist Cinthia Marcelle “To see in order to be seen.”
The exhibit of the nominees includes over 60 works. According to director general of the PinchukArtCentre Eckhard Schneider, almost half of this year’s nominees took part in the first prize exhibit in 2009, the rest are newcomers. However, in spite of this, this year’s exposition seems much more interesting. Below you will find a short review of the most interesting works, according to the author of the article.
Noticeably, young artists have finally started to get rid of the amorphous, for long outdated practice of postmodernism. The form of the works may be ordinary, even secondary, but they undoubtedly possess the freshness, acuteness, or radicalism of the gesture. The new trend in actual art is social, or even political.
For example, Volodymyr Kuznetsov, presenting the social-realistic etching by Vasyl Kasian Koliivshchyna (1939) in a separate big room, painted the whole room with bloody scenes of class slaughter in the style of aggressive graffiti, adding also romantic-revolutionary sentences like “Circulation of knowledge cancels hierarchy, it equals everyone to the top level” or “Give the power to communes.”
Mykyta Kadan in Pedestal. Practice of Exclusion built a conditional pedestal of white plasterboard, placing on the walls nearby a scarcely noticeable, white on the white, chronicle of destruction of monuments over Ukraine in the past few years, without paying attention whether it was a Bolshevism leader, UNR or OUN activist, or a Russian empress. The result was not new by form, but quite clear in its content expression addressed at modern vandalism.
Mykola Ridny reaches a special effect in the project “An Ant Workshop.” It shows several wheels from quarry wagons, a figure of an ant, laid by iron rolls on the wall, whereas the central element is a short video about working in a quarry. The screen features dump trucks, carrying the rock, and the author’s voice reads a text about forms of slavery among the ants which are no different from the forms of enslavement among people. Again, a tested form gives an articulated result.
Danylo Halkin in his project “BDSM 2222” uses open provocation. He places on the walls flat silhouettes of children, in ambiguous outfits and poses. In fact, they depict innocent pastimes, but for an overcautious adult they may seem a perversion. The author emphasizes the ambivalence by a ticklish commentary: “Stay away from children. Some children can make you child molesters.” The provocation turns out to be a research of the limits of allowed and forbidden things, as well as a test for the social morals as an extremely vague and uncertain unwritten law: after all, who establishes the rules, innocent people or those who are experts in all kinds of sins?
Among exclusively aesthetic studies special attention should be paid to Text (from the series “A Slaughter about Minimal”) by Ivan Svitlychny, which is the only example of sound art. The whole installation includes a pair of headphones, when the guest puts them on, he will hear a description of a work of art: “here starts the line… here is a triangle… here is a plane… here is a square… here is a sphere… Here the line ends.” The result, on the whole, is a witty outline of the borders of an artistic expression.
The installation Loneliness by Serhii Petliuk comprises 20 videos with people sitting on sofas. The audience sits down on the same sofa before the screens. In such a way Petliuk brings together the viewer with himself, by this indeed creating the situation of the viewer’s loneliness.
It will be known in a month whether any of the abovementioned works wins. The winners of the main and special awards, besides the cash prize totaling 100,000 and 25,000 hryvnias correspondingly, will be offered an opportunity to undergo a month-long training at the studios of the world renowned artists. Besides, the winner of the main prize will enter the list of the nominees for the international prize for young artists, Future Generation Art Prize-2012, without selection tour. Finally, the winner in the category “Public Prize” (determined according to the voting results of the exhibit’s guests) will get a cash prize of 10,000 hryvnias.
The winner of the main prize of the Future Generation Art Prize 2010, Brazilian artist Cinthia Marcelle is obviously a breakthrough of the PinchukArtCentre. Last year she won the main prize with her perfect by form, bright video works 475 Volver, Fonte 193, and A Crusade. Currently the Kyiv exhibit is Cinthia’s first solo project beyond Brazil. The exposition entitled “To see in order to be seen” includes a large-scale installation and a film specially created for the exhibit.
The installation is made of a carpet which covers a dust landscape. The work starts with an ordinary action: hiding dust under the carpet. Cinthia built a simple and elegant installation. The red wavy carpeting rise is crowned with a heap of black dust; on the other side there is only a rough slope made of the same ugly substance. This microlandscape, built within an exhibit hall, urges the audience to interact: you want to jump, run, and lie here, and the guests do so with pleasure; and the perspective looks of the installation change according to the height of the audience’s angle. The author succeeded to decode here a whole range of cultural symbols, from ecology to feasting one’s eyes on the landscapes of her native Brazil, a country of red clay soils, as well as to play with the audience in a house, where a carpet stands unfolded as if by magic, and the hidden side of things becomes obvious.
A Century is the second work by the artist, which she created jointly with a Brazilian filmmaker Tiago Mata Machado. The film is a usual for Cinthia work with recurrence and symmetry. We can see a fenced yard – maybe part of construction site – showered with increased intensity by construction materials, tools, various things, and then we see this explosion of destruction from an opposite angle, as if in a mirror reflection. The crossing produces a strange effect: we can see a repeated anti-construction and this symmetry alludes to swinging of a visual pendulum, which makes the film’s whole inner composition look beautiful.
Cinthia comments on her works, “Landscapes in my creative work, especially recently, have started to embody the idea of destruction, gathering remnants and scrap. They are also landscapes of culture, its borders and barriers, or, as they become landscapes, it is a border between nature and culture. Gathering may frequently be interpreted as a symbol of time. For me A Century is an image of dismantling of the epoch, the image of its ruination. In this dialogue, confrontation with Tiago I usually measure the borders of creative mess; our works are not so well-controlled any more: this is a freedom of cooperation.”
