Nezalezhni [Independent. – Ed.] exhibition is to commence on August 23 at the Mystetsky Arsenal cultural, artistic and museum center, commemorating the 20th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence. The exhibit will include the works of about 80 artists, representing all the prominent styles, genres and techniques of the Ukrainian contemporary art.
Organizers explain that their choice was determined by situation, for a lot of artworks were sold to private collectors, including foreigners, and the fate of many works is still unknown. Some stories and events have survived in the oral tradition only, while some again have been brought to us by art critics’ studies.
The exhibit will consist of thematic units, with each of them characterizing a long-term phenomenon of Ukrainian contemporary art that appeared as artists had been seeking new visual language, new issues and identities in the last two decades.
Thus, the Dialogue with the Screen unit is to try and explain the new global media’s impact on the artists’ creative thinking.
Another unit, Looking at the Society/Reacting to the Politics, will reflect the social and political realities to which the artists responded from 1991 until 2011. “There was time when artists might live in the ivory tower or work ‘for the drawer’ [i.e., to work without hope of publication in the near future. – Ed.], but nowadays, they cannot separate themselves from the society or refrain from reflecting it, even if distancing themselves,” explains Oleksandr Soloviov, the project curator, art critic, and deputy general director of the Mystetsky Arsenal.
History and Myth will present “new mythologies” and the rethinking of history.
Reality vs. Phantasm will tell the visitor about fanciful reality of Ukrainian art with its otherworldly effects and hidden messages.
The Beyond unit will show striking phenomena that are outside the usual art system.
“This exhibit is to show new art of a new country,” Soloviov said when interviewed by the website artarsenal.in.ua. “We had an urgent need to show it in the large exhibition project format, or, in clerical terms, as an ‘autocephalous’ one… holistic, self-sufficient, independent, but full of contradictions and open to various influences, which are omnipresent in the globalized world of our time. The identity issue is at the core of the exhibition’s thematic units. This issue has never been so topical before... The year 1991, the year of Ukraine’s independence, is a ‘reference layer,’ as a geologist would say. But, obviously, it would have been too soon to talk about instant and dramatic change in the nature of the Ukrainian contemporary art then. Despite having asserted itself as a powerful and original phenomenon as early as the Perestroika years and earned recognition in the united cultural space of the USSR as a new “southern wave” or “southern alternative” [especially, to the Moscow Conceptualist circles. – Author], the Ukrainian contemporary art continued to develop along the lines of the previous period, even in the changed environment of independence and autonomy. Only after a few years, Ukrainian artists’ sense of independence, or rather their gaining a new identity became irreversible,” the curator explains.
Nezalezhni exhibit will be held at the Mystetsky Arsenal from August 23 through September 11, 2011.
