Year: 2017

November, 2006 – September, 2012

Project Dotted Lines of Speech is aimed to gain a practical and artistic experience outside, the gallery and studio space. This project, developed as a series of reversible art interventions, explores area of public communication, develops the concept of event-driven scenarios for their practical implementation in the public space.

People, who are open to the exchange of knowledge, willing to contribute to the changes of the matters of public spaces, are invited to participate in the project Dotted Lines of Speech. Some models and principles were tested in 2006 at Zhitny Rynok Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2007 at cafe of House of Writers Vilnius, Lithuania, and in 2012 on Dongdaemun Market Seoul, South Korea.

Often actions of the project Dotted Lines of Speech have impromptu character, and though the outlines agreed upon in advance, meanings are formed during the intervention. Invited people can play a part of their own stories, and people from the audience are encouraged to become the heroes. As the result we have a work, the form of which is similar to public happenings, but with a paradoxical form of thinking where joint actions and communications allows to get new experience forcing to grasp an everyday reality with new sensations, in a new way.

August 2014 – January 2017

Project Between Revolution and War illuminates not only what is happening in Ukraine, but also look at the mechanisms that form the basis for most of the world’s conflicts, thus increasing awareness of both major political events and the personal life stories hidden behind all the impersonal statistics of war and the conflict’s wake.

Exhibitions At the heart of community sums up the project of the same name initiated by Open Place (Kyiv) Municipal Museum of Local Lore (Melitopol) and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (Warsaw). The main goal of which was an attempt to identify an effective model of socially oriented cultural organization and testing of certain aspects of this model in the Melitopol museum of Local Lore.

From March to September 2015, there were a series of meetings (lectures, workshops, working sessions)  in the museum aimed to establish the direct links between the museum and the local community, with the widest possible audience involvement in the process of studying the links between the development of cultural institutions and the development of society. Visitors became active participants in the process of rethinking the role of the museum in the life of the community, as well as their own role in the formation and development of the institution. As a result of the sessions were collected a variety of materials from diagram of the connections, video and photo documentation that illustrate the creative process during the sessions to the art objects, created both the invited experts and the participants themselves.

Among the most intriguing works on the exhibition, there are the pieces proposed by participants, the photographs representing the alternative to the permanent exhibition of the museum. These materials, along with archival documents from the personal file of the museum, telling about its history, formed the narrative of the exhibition.

IRYNA SKLOKINA
Lives and works in Lviv, Ukraine
Historian, research fellow of the Center of Urban History of East Central Europe. Defended her dissertation about the official Soviet policy of memory of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine using the example of Kharkiv region. Graduated from V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University (major in history of Ukraine). Worked at Kharkiv National University and the Kowalsky Eastern Institute of Ukrainian Studies (Kharkiv). A member of the Kharkiv Historical and Philological Society. At the Center for Urban History Iryna Sklokina researches historical heritage, in particular industrial and Soviet heritage in Kharkiv and Lviv.

МYKOLA SKYBA
Lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine
Director of the “Agency for Cultural Strategies”, participant in the “Culture 2025” platform, specialist in creative economy. Graduated from the Faculty of History of the Kyiv National University. T.Shevchenko (2001) and postgraduate study in the specialty “Ethnology”. Investigates the processes of socio-cultural transformations of Ukrainian society and cultural codes of the economy. As an expert in cultural politics, he tracks the dynamics of values’ changing ​​and their impact on the development of society. He analyzes the development of the museum sphere and the processes of forming a creative economy and the creative industries sector.

OLEKSIY RADINSKI
Lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine
Filmmaker and writer. He is a member of Visual Culture Research Center, an initiative for art, knowledge, and politics founded in Kyiv, 2008. Since 2011, he has been an editor of Ukrainian edition of Political Critique magazine. His work deals with representation and misrepresentation of social movements and lack of thereof.

NINA KHODORIVSKA
Lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine
Cultural researcher and journalist. Graduated from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Culturology. Got Master degree of Performance Studies from Helsinki University (Finland) and Warwick (UK). Member of the NGO “Theater for Dialogue”.

JANA SALAKHOVA
Lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine
Curator of the network “Diversity Initiative”. Joker in “Theater for Dialogue”, which operates according to the method of the theater of the oppressed. Specialist in combating racism and xenophobia, International Organization for Migration (IOM) Mission in Ukraine.

GABRIELA BULISOVA
Lives and works in Washington, D.C
Documentary photographer and multimedia artist. She was a Graduate fellow at the National Graduate Photography Institute at Columbia University in New York, NY. Her work focuses on underreported and overlooked stories affecting marginalized populations around the world and in the United States. She has numerous awards, among others: The National Press Photographers Association’s Short Grant, Winner of the 2013 Sondheim Prize, Open Society Institute’s Moving Walls 18, The Aperture Portfolio Review Top Tier Portfolios of Merit, A CEC ArtsLink Projects grant, The PDN Annual Photography Competition Winner, The CANON “Explorer of Light” award.

MARK ISAAC
Lives and works in Washington, D.C
Artist, working with photography, video, and installations. His work focuses on our capacity for positive change in an age saturated by electronic media and consumer culture.  Was awarded an MFA in Photography and Digital Imaging (2008) and an MA in Digital Arts (2007), both from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He also studied extensively at the Corcoran School of Art and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

DATA CHIGHOLASHVILI
Lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia
He is working between social anthropology and contemporary art, exploring the connections between them through theoretical research and projects. He is mainly interested in the topics concerning visual and urban anthropology, ethnography, socially-engaged art practices, public space, memory, migration, foodways – some of which are usually interconnected in his collaborative work. Since 2012 he is affiliated with artist initiative GeoAIR.

NINI PALAVANDISHVILI
Lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia
After studying Art History in Tbilisi, she graduated from the UdK Berlin in Faculty of Public and Industrial Communication. In 2006 Nini joined artist initiative GeoAIR and since then she is actively engaged in curating and organising international exchange project in Georgia and beyond its borders. Through her projects Nini researches on social and political contexts and its interpretation in the context of cultural production and contemporary art. She is interested in artistic practice that gives innovative forms and finds a language with which it is possible to speak about political and social matters

YURIY KRUCHAK
Lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine
Artist, curator, co-founder of the artistic platform Open Place. Graduated from Kharkov art-industrial institute and the National Academy of Fine Art and Architecture in Kyiv. His works in public space transform the audience into the actors, creating a community whose behaviour and interaction serves to interpret and reveal social structures in an urban environment.

YULIA KOSTEREVA
Lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine
Artist and curator. A Graduate fellow at the National Academy of Fine Art and Architecture, Kyiv, Ukraine (Graphic department). She is a co-founder and a member of the artistic platform Open Place. Her work explores motivation of people in their desire to make changes when apathy and acceptance of the existing situation turn to proactive position.

MYKHAILO SAZHNEV
Lives and works in Melitopol, Ukraine
A lecturer at Melitopol’s Bogdan Khmelnitsky State Pedagogical University. Mykhailo works at the natural-geographic faculty in the department of tourism, social and economic geography and regional studies.

DENIS MIROSHNIK
Lives and works in Melitopol, Ukraine
A lecturer who has long been interested in philosophy, religion, culture, archaeology, history and Buddhism: the latter has informed his lifestyle over the course of the last 15 years.

MACIEJ WOŁOSIUK
Lives and works in Warsaw,  Poland
Graduated from Cultural Studies of Central and Eastern Europe at Warsaw University. His interests lay in the area of mass culture in USSR and its impact on social relations. Maciej is currently working at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland.

KATIA SZCZEKA
Lives and works in Warsaw,  Poland
A collection specialist, cultural manager and curator currently working at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland. She graduated from Warsaw University (MA in British Studies) and Sotheby’s Institute of Art (MA in Fine and Decorative Art).

Local is the New Global raises the question of how to translate the context and personal experience into a universal statement, which would understandable for a wide range of people. The conjecture, Local is the New Global, doesn’t aim to unravel all complexities of contemporary society and its components. Instead, it proposes a methodology when these complexities can become the basis of work, rethinking problems as themes, which are only then transformed into complete works of art or direct actions.

Local is the New Global contributes an exchange of knowledge and obtaining new experience. It facilitates self-determination. It develops a culture of dialogue. A common field of understanding between participants is created, priorities of the group determined, all in due process.

Architecture of Opportunities is an applied study aimed at developing a strategy of activity of the artistic institution, where society is a co-creator of common values, artistic phenomena and cultural context, and the construction of three-dimensional concept of such an institution.

The series of working sessions Architecture of Opportunities aimed to start the new practice of collaboration between various activists, social, artists, and professional communities while elaborating a concept of a multifunctional cultural center. The results can be summarized as follows: activists consider the Center as an institution where horizontal links between different communities will be set up and developed. They prefer the cluster model, where each invited organization will have opportunity to work at least 2-3 years. According to the vision of the artistic community, connections can be built vertically. They see the necessity of “service structure” which will moderate the work of communities in the center. This structure can work on a permanent basis. Cultural managers in their turn consider the potential center as “service structure”. Kiev residents understand the future center as a meeting place of different communities. All four groups came together in two important issues, namely: the main function of the center should be educational, and the center should be a place to develop a new identity.

Architecture of Opportunities project, which began as a local event, was transformed into a global study of work within the society and with the society in establishing connections and meanings.

The project’s objectives are to expand the field of artistic activity and to unite the different parts of society by means of art. The aim of Start Time project is, together with people resting in the park, develop the park, formulate its mission and the ways of development. The project discusses the questions – “What is the park”, “How it should look like” “What kind it should be”.

Developed as a series of reversible interventions, which combine the methods of sports contests, physical work, and art creation, the Start Time project establishes the links between past and present culture, as well as, ideology.

The project Lion’s Share shows time as a stable structure that filled with objects of various ideological systems, and proposes to make a mental journey from present to past and back. The real stories of families that that adopted the wild animals become the basis for the revision. In the project, an animal becomes a personage, on behalf of which a story is telling. It gives an opportunity to look at reality from another point of view.

The installation Lion’s Share includes a collection of diapositives and slides produced by the State companies and individuals from the 50s to 2000 as well as actual stories. Installation being based on the intersection of the real facts and fiction provides an opportunity to see in one space the facts that have taken place before, now and after. The installation deforms the connection between the objects, images and texts, and provides a sociological analysis of the structure of everyday life.