About thirty artists from Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, the Czech Republic, Germany, the UK, and Israel took part in the biennale. The program comprised authors’ own and supervised projects, performances, installations, lectures, debates, and master classes.
“For the past two years since the last Contemporary Art Week (CAW), our society has been living in the conditions of war, uncertainty, degeneration, and hope... We cannot pretend to be out of this context. So, this year’s CAW will try to find the extent to which these borderline conditions can influence contemporary Ukrainian art and see whether they are strong enough to be a stage in its development,” the organizers said on the eve of the opening. The event was organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Dzyga art association. The Lviv-based artists Volodymyr Kaufman and Lydia Savchenko-Duda were the Week’s curator and art director, respectively.
It is worthwhile to add that the Contemporary Art Week is a large-scale project that gathers artist from various countries and of different generations at one area. Since the CAW was launched in 2008, it has seen about 400 participants from Poland, the US, Canada, Israel, the UK, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine. The organizers believe that the biennale is an important place of artistic expression for both renowned and little-known artists.
LEMINARIUM IS A MULTI-GENRE SPACE OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE ASSOCIATED WITH THE EXPLORATION AND CREATIVE RECONSIDERATION OF THE FIGURE OF STANISLAW LEM. AN EXHIBIT, “LEMINARIUM GRAPHIC NOVELS,” WHICH COMBINED VITALII VNUKOV’S SCULPTURES AND ILLUSTRATIONS TO FABLES FOR ROBOTS, WAS STAGED AS PART OF LEMINARIUM
The main venues of this year’s CAW were the Palace of Arts, the Guesthouse of the Arkhistratyg spiritual and cultural center, the City Museum (in the City Hall basement), and the city space. The Dzyga gallery was the biennale’s hub.
As part of the CAW, the Palace of Arts presented a supervised project, “Body Parts,” which displayed works by 10 authors from various regions of Ukraine – Yurko Vovkohon, Dima Erlikh, Kostiantyn Zorkin, Volodymyr Kaufman, Natalia Lisova, Serhii Petliuk, Serhii Radkevych, Volodmyr Stetskovych, Hennadii Cherneha, and Volodymyr Topii.
And what brought together the artists of Ukraine and Poland (Mykhailo Barabash, Teresa Barabash, Volodymyr Kaufman, Anton Lapov, Serhii Savchenko, Kostiantyn Smolianinov, and Slawomir Sobczak, Daniel Koniusz, Jakub Jasiukiewicz) was the pilot project LEMinarium, a multi-genre space of contemporary culture associated with the exploration and reconsideration of the figure of Stanislaw Lem, a philosopher, science fiction writer, and futurologist.
