The new Aut Exhibit, organized by the nonprofit association Doroshenko Hryshchenko Clinic could not fail to attract public attention, even if by virtue of its venue: the Kyiv Palace built by Semen Mohiliovtsev, a millionaire of the pre-revolution time, currently popularly known as the Chocolate Palace. Recently it became accessible to public after lengthy restoration works (still to be completed).
According to the press releases, this exhibit focuses on autism, a special condition of consciousness that has in the several past years attracted increasing attention of psychologists, and artists. The general public has learned about autism from the Hollywood blockbuster Rain Man, starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman.
In this building on Shovkovychna St. one finds on display all known creative techniques, from painting to installation to photography to print to video art.
Fedir Aleksandrovych (Kyiv) has submitted his semiabstract painting entitled Napoleon executed using a mixture of techniques.
Ihor Konovalov (b. Novy Buh) likewise combines virtual technique with overall dramatic presentation, as evidenced by his Yaiechnia (Fried Eggs).
Paintings by Valeria Trubina (b. Luhansk, currently lives and works in the US) are marked by metaphysics and a desire to play games. Her Sweet Dreams. Sky Animals’ Parade is a portrait of a child as though seen through bluish water, framed by reed, topped with a golden arc of animals that look like stars made from gold-powdered cookies.
Anatolii Ulyanov, a scandalous blogger and journalist who is currently in forced emigration, prepared a surprisingly neutral installation entitled Ditta, Goria, Zaikato, with an exaggerated slow-motion sequence of human faces on two monitor screens.
Tetiana Hershuni, an artist from Kyiv, made a controversial single whole by putting together two absolutely different works, placing her Twin Portrait of My Mother (an anaglyph image; when viewed through a pair of special glasses, it becomes three-dimensional) under The Fear of the Grand Piano, with safety razor blades inserted between the keys.
The music theme was prominent in the installation of Serhii Zubenko (Kharkiv), a huge plane table with rows of antiquated gramophone records in curved frames under glass cover, each with a pair of headphones. By donning them you could hear the original music.
Oksana Merfenko (Hryshchenko), the exhibit’s co-curator, placed large cubes with conventional apartment interior photos pasted to each side.
Risa Horowitz (Canada) submitted her Thirtieth Year by Day, a diary without words, a series of small (12.7x12.7 cm) pictures portraying the life of two characters, a man and a woman, using certain symbols.
Taras Polataiko, a Ukrainian Canadian, born in Chernivtsi, was represented by two installations, Scotoma (translates as a blind spot, which means that a certain aspect of life is out of the grasp of a neurotic patient), a series of human eyes painted with photographic precision and looking at the viewer from an impenetrable white wall, and his Moth, with two screens in a darkened room, one showing a moth beating against an invisible wall and the opposite one showing a pair of hands trying to get hold of at least something but grabbing empty air instead.
Polataiko’s two compositions and Hershuni’s Fear were in perfect accord with the exhibit’s theme, conveying so well an autistic individual’s trend of groping in the dark and trying to figure out what the surrounding world is all about. Add here the self-isolation and the daily fear of direct contact while wishing to use someone else’s hand to touch something for him/her; daily walking the edge of the blade, this subtle boundary line dividing the usual autistic world and the chaos of outside daily life.
What’s left is to figure out how the rest of the works on display relate to autism.
As a postscript, those who are interested in this theme will be interested in knowing what will happen next. May 13: roundtable with scholars, writers, and artists; May 20: launch of the Ukrainian researcher Dina Shulzhenko’s book Autism: Not a Death Verdict, Kalvaria Publishers’ Ukrainian version of Mark Haddon’s bestselling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and the Interesni kazky group’s graffiti design on a wall of an apartment building in downtime Kyiv (the date remains to be set).
