Curator | UNFOLDING LANDSCAPES: Poetics and Landscapes in Contemporary Ukrainian Art | Silkeborg Foundation, Denmark 29.01 – 01.05.20 | Unfolding Landscapes presented photography, painting and installation by 42 Ukrainian artists opened in Denmark on 29 January 2020 just a few weeks before the violent Russian attacks on Ukraine. Art often reflects the divided lens of history and so our exhibition that was intended to represent a positive statement of Ukrainian creative culture, shifted its immediate interpretations. ou can find an overview of the 42 artists below and my introductory essay. During 2022 the exhibition toured to Brussels and Switzerland.

UNFOLDING LANDSCAPES Curators Introduction

Sitting under the Carpathian mountains, Ukraines vast and fertile plains and plateaus cover some 603,628 km of land. A magnificent landscape historically divided by the Dneiper river, which flows from the northern border, past Kyiv, to the southern port of Kherson, where it meets the Black Sea.

In a country known for its radically changing infrastructures, it is no surprise that Ukrainian artistic conscience remains rooted in relations between man and environment — inspired and propelled by Ukraine’s striking and often turbulent landscapes, both geographically, and politically.

In the curating of Unfolding Landscapes we began at the fertile heart of the current artistic scene. A generation born mostly since the early 1980’s, these artists were born citizens of the USSR, and were teenagers when Ukraine officially declared itself an independent country in 1991. Studying through the mid-late ‘00s, many moved to the capital Kyiv to attend the acclaimed National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture. Living as young adults through the post-Soviet crisis of the 1990’s, they experienced first hand the 2014 ‘Revolution of Dignity’, which condemned the totalitarian Communist and Nazi regimes, and began the decommunisation of modern Ukraine.

In Ukraine to be an artist is also to be an activist. Inherent in the practice of these artists is a unique paradigm of perception. An urge to protest and question space and its boundaries. A deep connection with the symbolic meanings of territory, of public and private space. And an innate understanding of the potential to change and evolve, to merge or to be reborn, and to flourish.

In Ksenia Hnylytska’s sculpture, The Dream of Pier Micheli, or The Monument to the Victory of Saprotrophs, she envisages the destruction and rebirth of human civilisation. Her colourful columns —whilst conceived in the image of Stalinist Empire monumentality, offer instead the transformative power of nature, of fungi and bacteria, as the matter through which to rebuild the remnants of civilisation.

Ukraines once dominant and now vanishing Soviet monuments have become markers of this generation. Yevgen Nikiforov’s photographic series On Republic’s Monuments chronicles the post-Soviet erasing of the past (‘Leninfall’) from 2014-2021; and Yuri Yefanov’s 2013 video The Cube revisits a now lost world on the Crimean coast. To witness this re-writing of political history, predisposes the future with a sense of ambiguity and uncertainty.

This anxiety for the future can be seen in works by artists Anna Bekerskaya. Her collage Transition is dedicated to the issue of Ukrainian and Polish-forced emigrants, and depicts a young generation waiting on an oil rig, suspended in an empty sea, unsure of future or past. 

Ukraines transitional society is captured by photojournalist Sasha Maslov’s Ukrainian Railroad Ladies. His photo-book chronicles Ukraines pastel-coloured railroad crossing houses, a vernacular phenomenon that seems surely on the brink of vanishing in to a world driven by automation, the ancient to the modern.

Capturing this valley between old and new worlds, Elena Subach and Vyacheslav Polyakov’s work Grandmothers on the Edge of Heaven, is a study on the hardship and challenges faced by elderly generations. This family story reflects on a gap between generations, which is mirrored directly in the gap between two countries and political systems: Soviet Union and modern Ukraine. 

Following the maps and ley-lines which have forged the countries changing and often conflicting identity, Ukraines young artists are compelled to explore the psycho-geography of their country. As social activists they study and re-draw its topology, looking to articulate shifts in social and ideological environments, both natural and urban.

Architect and artist Dana Kosmina’s Huts Housing Complex is a response to Kyiv’s housing estate developments which have built up chaotically, whilst their neighbouring Roma settlements draw a stark line between government and these comparably ‘anarchist’ constructions. Kosmina’s project Architectural Refugees is a series of banners depicting stone monuments in scaffolding, reflecting on the problematic approach of Ukraine’s decommunisation of the architecture and heritage that once defined their cityscapes.

The subject of housing and land use is explored also by Nikita Kadan in his project Everybody wants to live by the sea. A topological study presenting the fragile architectural structures built around the Crimea coast, and the xenophobia still inherent since Stalin’s deportations in 1944.

Taras Kovach’s work investigates the social phenomenon of the city, its inhabitants and their coexistence. His installation NETRI (Slums/Suburbs) includes a series of landscape etchings based on popularised wallpapers of the Perestroika period (1985 - 1991) which exhibited exotic corners of nature, and were used to decorate urban residential dwellings. Through this idealisation residents were able to dream a utopian view from their imagined windows. In Kovach’s artwork he replaces the idealised image with a typical cityscape, placing instead the tropical visions on blackened glass.

Indeed, the guiding force of nature persists, be it an imagined dream from a city window, or a view from a mountainous plane. Sculptor Nazar Bilyk’s work questions directly the fragile dialogue between man and nature, and the difficulties in coexistence. Rather than an image of a visible landscape, Bilyk describes his work as a projection of the artist’s inner state.

Painter Yuri Pikul’s Forest Belt, 92 km re-imagines traditional landscape painting through the structure of geometry and mathematics. Whilst multi-media performer Ujif Notfound’s topological video TER.RAIN, translates landscapes through digital algorithm, in which kinetic waves and frequencies draw abstract forms from nature.

Drawing us back into the earth, Ruins Collective’s Dendro Dreams studies the ancient society of Ukraine’s trees. Their mediative film chronicles fifteen trees including a 250-year-old Kniazha Apple Tree in Sumy Oblast, Krolevets, and an Olive tree growing for over 2000 years in the Nikita Botanical Garden, in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.

Featured on our catalogue cover is Volatility, an installation by artist and activist Zhanna Kadyrova. A silent moment for us to reflect on nature and the elements, as we watch her white balloons oscillate with a trembling frequency, suspended above a lake on Mount Dragobrat in the Carpathian Mountains.

As the picture of todays artistic scene began to take form, we looked back to the artists born in the mid-century. To the artists who fought against the borders during Stalin’s doctrine of Socialist Realism. Working from the late 1980’s these artists represented the New Ukrainian Wave, a group of artist working with a new artistic expression; many of whom were instrumental in establishing the art groups Kyiv Paris Commune group and Pictorial Reserve which revolutionised the contemporary art practice and during the early 1990s and beyond. 

Focusing in this group on landscape painting, we present artworks from nineteen influential painters and image makers including artists such as Oleksandr Hnylytskyi, Vasyl Ryabchenko, Vlada Ralko, Hryhoriy Havrylenko. And we capture the new wave of visual expression and provocation and in the work of artists Tiberiy Silvashi, Pavlo Makov, Oleg Tistol, and Sergei Sviatchenko. Passing down knowledge from generations we see artistic and ideological lines emerge. In these works we find stories of landscapes not lost, but perhaps vanishing and reborn.

Emerging as we are through a distinctly changed global landscape, Unfolding Landscapes presents 42 artists working in painting, drawing, sculpture, installation and video. We intend the exhibition to take our audience on a journey through Ukraine as it is now, and how it could be, through the eyes of two generations of artists. Through their work we learn how the landscape is utilised, how it is perceived, and what knowledge and understanding we can draw from its unfolding. 

Faye Dowling, Curator, London.  

ARTISTS:

Anna Bekerskaya, Nazar Bilyk, Katya Buchatska , Ksenia Hnylytska, Lucy Ivanova, Zhanna Kadyrova , Vitaliy Kokhan, Alexey Kondakov, Dana Kosmina, Taras Kovach, Katya Libkind, Sasha Maslov, Yevgen Nikiforov , Yuriy Pikul,  Julie Poly, Stepan Ryabchenko, Ruїns Collective, Oleksiy Sai, Elena Subach & Vyacheslav Poliakov , Ujif Notfound, Yuri Yefanov, Anna Zvyagintseva .

Hryhoriy Havrylenko , Oleksandr Hnylytskyi, Oleg Holosiy ,Pavlo Kerestey , Mykola Kryvenko , Anatoliy Kryvolap , Pavlo Makov , Mykola Matsenko ,Vlada Ralko , Vasyl Ryabchenko, Andriy Sahaidakovskyi , Yuri Solomko, Marina Skugareva, Tiberiy Silvashi , Sergei Sviatchenko ,Oleg Tistol, Lesia Zayats, Viktor Zaretskyi, Alexander Zhyvotkov.

Consultation: Natalia Matsenko [UA]. Sergei Sviatchenko [DK/UA] Gallery Director: Iben From [DK]

The exhibition is developed with the support of Silkeborg Foundation, European Region of Culture, Danish Art Foundation, Tymofeev Foundation and Abromavych Art Foundation, Kyiv, UA.