Exhibition of shortlisted artists for the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2022

Wall, piano.
Courtesy of the artist.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

In his artistic practice, Saenko consistently explores the topic of space, aiming to find a more abstract and pristine representation of it. This led him to working with landscapes and researching power relations between the artist himself and the land as his object. Eventually, all attempts to rein in nature end with total capitulation of the artistic figure: it merges into the environment, becoming a part of the landscape.

This artwork invites the viewer into a gloomy and dismal room with a rectangle on the wall opposing the entrance. The rectangle is neither a painting, nor a screen, nor an object in general: it is a frame, a window into the void from which sounds are coming. It might be an audio recording playing on a loop or an artist himself playing piano and singing a poem by Vasyl Stus, the Ukrainian poet repressed by the Soviet Union, "In autumn, let grass burn...".

Saenko creates his landscape as a spatial painting by using light, shadow and sound as artistic tools. Attempting to deprive the artwork of objectivity and seeking freedom from cultural prescriptions, the artist abandons the market-driven forms of art.

3-channel video 23′33″, carpet, pillows, drywall construction.
Courtesy of the artist.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre, supported by Goethe-Institut Ukraine.

In his new artwork, Khodak explores the political potential of the trending Chinese social media TikTok, its algorithms and the possibilities to invent a new political language comprehensible to the youth.

The artist invites the visitor to lay back and dive in the stream of TikTok videos with references to Ukrainian avant-garde practices. The videos were mostly shot in Kharkiv's 'Slovo' House, which was an important cultural centre in the 1930s for Ukrainian avant-garde artists, the majority of whom were eventually repressed during the Stalinist era. For this work, Khodak invited two TikTokers to Kharkiv to participate in the rebuilding of the city and create video content on-site, under virtually constant missile and artillery shelling. In an attempt to revive the broken tradition of Ukrainian Modernism, the artist asked the TikTokers to live in the 'Slovo' House for several days and to speculate together about the new post-war utopian country.

Right across the room from the corner with the TikTok videos, a huge drywall construction is placed; its shape refers to the aesthetics of avant-garde monumental projects. The construction is covered with quotes from the leaked viral video from 2007 showing the Ukrainian politician Mykhailo Dobkin trying to properly deliver his speech for a campaign ad for local elections in Kharkiv, with his political ally Hennadiy Kernes brutally instructing him from behind the scenes. In the installation, the artist juxtaposes an absolutist maximalist utopian idea of how politics should be made with the actual reality of politics.

Photopolymer.
Courtesy of the artist.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

Nikitina's new work is a sculpture depicting four kids playing hide-and-seek. Three of them are covering their eyes with their hands and facing the wall, while the fourth kid, a little boy, is discreetly peeping at the viewer. These kids are Ukrainians who were forced to flee their homes after the full-scale war broke out, and now live in Brno, Czech Republic. They are labelled as refugees, but they refuse to call themselves that and rather perceive the whole situation as a sort of a temporary game where they have to keep counting months and wait to come back to Ukraine. In this game, they are not hiding but seeking.

After February 24th, Nikitina co-lead creative workshops in Brno helping Ukrainian kids to distract themselves from the tragic events and adapt to the new place of stay. These classes eventually proved therapeutic not only for the children but for the artist herself, as she learnt how to stay sane by keeping optimistic just as kids do, light-heartedly and sometimes a bit naïvely.

Nikitina creates her photopolymer sculptures by 3D scanning and printing. Her artistic practice includes making 3D reportages, documenting and archiving certain current events to make objects that could become social documents in the future. Instead of capturing popular public figures, the artist focuses on new personalities, new actors of our reality, such as soldiers in rehabilitation or, like in this case, kids. The whole idea behind her sculptures is not to glorify a hero, but rather to thank her chosen muses for giving hope and inspiring others to hold on and keep believing in the best even in the darkest times.

We'll Meet Again, 2022

Video, photos, objects, text.
Courtesy of the artist.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

Write at Least Once a Day, 2022

Video, 25.04.2022 – ongoing.
Courtesy of the artist.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

My Mother's Photos, 2022

24 рhotos, digital print, Hahnemühle Rag Baryta 315 gsm.
Courtesy of the artist.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

Father-land, 2022

10 objects, text.
Courtesy of the artist.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

In his works, Yuriy Biley explores the topic of emigration and reflects on current social and political events. Most of his projects are based on personal experiences, which he further shapes through borrowings and quotations. The topic of emigration is a natural direction of his artistic practice, as seven years ago Biley moved to Poland.

In this work, he is using familiar art forms to depict his newly emerged feelings concerning the war and to reflect on them. It consists of three chapters, each dedicated to one member of Biley's family, all of whom live in Ukraine.

The first chapter is dedicated to the artist's younger brother, who is currently fighting the war in the frontline. Here, Yuriy Biley presents a video with ongoing editing titled Write at Least Once a Day, in which he reads aloud his correspondence with his brother. The second chapter of the work, titled Father-land, presents objects together with accompanying stories. These are artefacts that anchor memories starting from the artist's childhood and tell about his father's influence on Biley's personal artistic development. In the third chapter, titled My Mother's Photos, the author displays photographs taken by his mother, depicting bouquets of flowers grown and composed by herself. All of these were made after February 24, 2022. By including her works, Biley finds a way to present his mother's untapped creative potential to a wider audience.

We'll Meet Again shows a poetic overlay of longing, love, fear, guilt and dismay that the artist feels due to the impossibility of making the right choice. The decision of whether to stay with his wife in Poland or to visit his relatives in Ukraine puts him into a position of tragic conflict with no real solution. Thereby, the artist also raises the issue of the new reality where Ukrainians living abroad cannot return home.

Plasterboard, profile, cable channel, fitted carpet, construction film, timber beam, pressed wood.
Initiated by the artists.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

This project by Vladimirov and Maiboroda questions the utility of art in times of war. In the space, there are collected construction materials used or bought for mounting the previous exhibitions at the PinchukArtCentre. Among the materials, there are both new and used pieces. Plasterboard, profile, fitted carpet, timber beam, etc — each of the presented and described objects will be handed over to Ukrainian NGOs for the reconstruction of houses that suffered from russian armed aggression in the Kyiv region. Until the volunteers pick up the materials, the exhibition space is temporarily turned into a storage room.

Acknowledgments to Dmytro Chepurnyi and Yaroslav Shafinskyi for their help in setting up the exposition.

Digital print, lightboxes.
Courtesy of the artist.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

Humilevskyi started working on his new series entitled Roots after the beginning of the full-scale invasion. In this work, he continues the journey to discover his inner self that he embarked on in the previous series, Giant. In Roots, the artist ponders the same subject but takes a different perspective: he looks at himself as part of a community and tries to find a new means to unite people, not based exclusively on the concept of nation. He offers images of a new ideology that are rooted in his fantasies, revealing subconscious spiritual symbols and showing the ways in which they are subtly ingrained in all of us.

The display of this work mimics a chapel where the lyrical hero, i.e. the artist himself, is looking at the viewer from above, assuming the role of the creator God. Humilevskyi's whole practice could be viewed as a journey to find his inner essence, with the author learning to love himself along the way. By making self-portraits and using nudity as a tool, he celebrates an unapologetic self-acceptance and finds freedom in it.

Acknowledgments to Sergey Melnitchenko.

Video 7′44″, organ bench.

This new artwork by Nikolay Karabinovych is the final chapter of the trilogy that the artist has been presenting at PinchukArtCentre over the last four years. The first part, The Voice of Thin Silence, told a story about his grandfather who was deported to Kazakhstan in 1949. In the second one, entitled Even Further, Karabinovych was researching his own Greek and Jewish roots, reflecting on the historical tension between these peoples, which now have their respective diasporas co-existing in modern-day Odesa. In the third and final chapter, he dives into experiences having to do with yet another ordeal faced by a member of his family, this time the artist's mother. While consistently sharing personal, familial stories, he chooses to present them in a very minimalist and concise way, sparing the details and thus allowing the viewer to better relate to the plot.

In this retelling of a small personal tragedy, the artist implies millions of similar ones destined to pass unnoticed due to their assumed insignificance as compared to atrocities of war. He emphasises the tension between the presence and absence that many Ukrainians in exile experience nowadays. In the video, the artist's mother plays Francis Poulenc's Concerto for Organ, Timpani and Strings on an imaginary organ. No music is heard and no audience is seen on the screen; she is surrounded by silence and solitude of a desolate desert.

Oil on canvas, levkas.
Courtesy of the artist.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

At the end of a shaded room stands a canvas depicting in monochrome a boy's chest mutilated by disease. The silent seclusion of this temple-like space makes the image resemble an icon: the boy's light skin glows and strikes the eye.

In her new piece, Melnyk emphasizes the duality of the empathetic feeling that one experiences in front of the pain of others. Here, she shifts her interest from the topic of violence to that of pain without specifically focusing on its cause. Even though this work is based on the artist's research in a war photo archive, she does not depict a war injury. Instead, she uses illness as a metaphor for war, seeing it as a battle between life and death.

In her artistic practice, Melnyk consistently uses levkas, a primer traditionally employed in icon painting. By means of this medium, she creates a sacred experience and sensual tension between an artwork and a viewer. The painting has been created by gradual application of numerous semi-transparent layers of paint to get the final picture. It took the artist several months of meticulous work, during which she literally constantly had to face the image of pain emerging on the canvas.

Dedicated to Vlad Malashevskyi (27.02.2022) and Fedir Surzhenko (05.06.2015), whose hearts would not accept the coming violence.

Video, digital print, neon.
Courtesy of the artist.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

Video length:
1 room: 19′11″;
2 room (from left to right): 2′24″, 4′33″, 5′28″, 2′15″;
3 room: 6′45″

The central topic of Viktoriia Dovhadze's new work is the human body as a subject of public punishment. It sways between fear and desire while experiencing pain and pleasure, either simultaneously or separately. The artist creates an immersive exploratory installation that presents the experiences of several characters interacting with the body in the area of the abnormal: an individual who must be fixed, a masturbator and a necrophiliac. The work also pays special attention to the body itself, which is finally able to be free in its secret desires.

The display is divided into three parts, each presented in a separate room. Inside those, the concepts of fear and desire mutually permeate, intertwine, assert or deny each other.

The first and second rooms are dedicated to the Monster, who shows itself but at the same time tries to hide its true face. It is hiding behind social norms, the only universally accepted truth, which is nevertheless still escapable by the Monster.

The third room is devoted to the body as a domain of desires, both hidden and primitive, that now refuses to be controlled. There is, however, another side to this liberation: at some point, desires change to hate, which suddenly becomes a source of pleasure in its own right.

Dovhadze presents a visual exploration of the border between imagination and reality. She looks at it through the lens of dreams, and hidden cravings, revealing just how blurred it is in the realm of the subconscious.

Necrophiliac

Necrophilia is a striving towards everything dead, sick, putrid and decayed. It is a passion to turn the living into lifeless, lust for destruction for its own sake.

A necrophiliac is the antipode of life.

Necrophiliacs are drawn to the darkness and the abyss. In mythology and poetry, their attention is always confined to caves, ocean depths, dungeons, eerie mysteries and imagery of blind people.

To subdue and control something that is alive, one has to kill it.

The necrophiliac disposition may manifest in the belief that the only way to resolve problems and conflicts is through violence.

A necrophiliac has no interest in other people, nature or anything alive.

Masturbator

Here, the main character is not the one attacking but rather the one being attacked. Sometimes people do not recognise this, sometimes they do very clearly.

A monster and a victim, entities that have very different stories, meet in one space.

One of them only brings violence and enjoys; the other happily takes it.

Acknowledgments to Hlib Yashchenko (knyazcotic), ТУЧА, Molly Route, Viktoriia Teolohova.

Ink on 20-meter-long rolls of film, acrylic and metal pipes.
Courtesy of the artist.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre, Stiftung Kunstfonds and University of Arts Berlin.
Setup assistance by Vitaliy Kokhan.

The installation consists of large-scale ink drawings, interwoven into an ephemeral construction. Lines interfere with shapeless forms, from time to time changing their accuracy, or simply following the chaos of ink pigment diffusing in water. These diagrammatic drawings follow and combine some of the qualities of time, in both the way people experience it and in the way they are expressed in languages — time flies, flows, stays still. It melts away, it expands and contracts, it can be overwhelming, it can be distressing. In some moments or longer periods you are confronted with time through your body.

The environment, formed by drawings and its supportive construction, follows the intangible character of time. Its linearity, so useful for orientation, is shaken, torn, or melted, so that individuals may feel crushed or dissolved. The elements of the construction support each other in their different qualities — steel cannot stand without fragile acrylic. Tattered time flows through the gaze — maybe we are inside the body tissue that has been torn, the fragments spread over the surfaces. The rolls of drawings are like a film that a viewer can see at once. An image of time emerges, slipping away from the moment which is framed by the construction.

Acknowledgements to brother Ilya Kuzmych and father Serhiy Kuzmych, who serve in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and other defenders of Ukraine. And also Stefan Weber, Elisabeth Weber, Stefan Lettner, Alexander Heinich.

Video 4′43″, artefact.
Courtesy of the artist.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

The Fragments project emerged from Alekseenko's expedition trips to document the situation in liberated towns around Kyiv, namely Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel, Borodyanka and some others. The artist filmed the consequences of the occupation and locals' attempts to tidy up their homes even though some residential buildings have had their necessary elements almost completely destroyed in the hostilities. In the dwellings, among different ruined household items, he often finds shattered crystal glasses and vases. These crystal objects, once symbols of wealth and prosperity, are visual images of soviet everyday life, becoming now a recognizable part of the landscape of destruction.

The video shows a close-up of restoration of a crystal glass carried out by meticulous gluing of its shards back together. The final product, i.e. the restored glass, is showcased in an illuminated pedestal in the centre of the exhibition space. Even though it might look like a practically usable item, its surface is still covered with cracks, which makes it more of an artefact holding memory of the war than an actual piece of glassware.

Second hand furniture, videos of various duration, audio.
Courtesy of the artist.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

Camaraderie Sect, 2020

Video 34'

90s Days Of The War, 2022

Video 15'53''

What Is To Be Done? 2021

Video 15'50''

My Grandfather's Skin, 2020

Video 4'45''

About Gray and Beautiful, 2022

Film trailer

Video 4'

In his new artwork, Bachynska presents five videos filmed before and during the full-scale invasion. In these, the artist imagines a utopian community of the future and integrates his reveries into the contemporary context. Instead of confining himself to social criticism, he suggests a fresh idea of how the world might be.

The space in which these are presented is a total installation that reminds of interiors typical for old flats in Lviv (Bachynskа's native city), recognisable from the videos. The walls are covered with soot and harsh strokes of dark grey lime; the room is furnished with second-hand tables, armchairs and sofas. With these details, the artist creates a cosy place and invites the viewer into the intimate space of his.

3D visualisation 5′.
Courtesy of the artist.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

The title of the new 3D video by Yuri Yefanov, We Will Definitely Talk About This After The
Last Air Raid Alert Stops, refers to the impossibility for an artist to reflect on the current
turmoil due to the lack of distance crucial for processing the flow of tragic events. In an
attempt to find a relevant form of artistic expression, the artist presents his own vision of the
future utopian society.

In the world he imagines, nature has won and made humankind try to find balance in its co-
existence with non-human life forms. Yefanov speculates on how the power dynamics
between nature and humans is going to change, creating an example of a future artwork: a
sculpture of a garden gnome made of organic materials. As the video unfolds, the gnome,
being an object, changes its status from a public monument to a piece of land art, reflecting
the author's attempt to find the frontier between nature and culture. Eventually, when both
concepts merge into one, the statue returns to the status of a public monument.

The video comprises three chapters; the second and the third parts of it will be added during
the exhibition period.

Music, sound design Dmytro Avksentiev.
Additional 3D Ihor Durniev.
Voice-over Natalia Matsenko.

Video 11′08″ .
Courtesy of the artists.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

This new work is a part of Revkovskyi & Rachinskyi's larger project dedicated to study of the history of tank battles in the territory of Ukraine. In the course of the research, the artists found out that Ukraine is the country that saw the largest number of tank battles in the world's history, starting from the warfare around the Kakhovka bridgehead in 1920, when tanks were first used in its terrains. During the World War II, German soldiers nicknamed exploded Soviet tanks Mickey Mouses, as the distorted hatches reminded them of the famous cartoon character's ears, hence the name of the artwork.

The video shows a field where military vehicles are turning into an integral part of the landscape, with two main characters, impersonated by the artists themselves, wandering around. In the field, they stumble upon a destroyed russian tank and start dismantling its remains to sell them as scrap metal. While doing this, they are whispering prayers asking some abstract supernatural forces to protect them from artillery attacks, mines and other dangers of war.

Acknowledgments to BrahmaFilms (Kryvyi Rih) and Kharkiv Media Hub (Kharkiv).

commercial public art x mnpl

Reassembling the Urban, 2022
(the work is exhibited on the street near the art centre)

Elements of urban and military urban infrastructure.
Courtesy of the artists.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

Reassembling the Urban mockup, 2022

Leftovers from past exhibitions, objects from the art centre warehouse, 3D printing, digital printing, paper, self-adhesive.
Courtesy of the artists.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

The first part of the project is presented outside the building, with a display of urban elements set up at a parking lot. For their collaborative piece, the artists of the commercial public art collective and the MNPL group utilised some usual elements of a cityscape, such as benches, road delineators, lanterns and garbage cans, complementing them with objects that wartime has brought to urban space, namely concrete blocks and anti-tank hedgehogs. This is the first ever artistic reinvention of the road in front of PinchukArtCentre. It has recently become a pedestrian zone, and now people can further customise and inhabit it, as well as interact with the object constructed at the parking lot by sitting on it, leaning against it, etc.

Inside the exhibition space, the visitors are invited to participate in a cooperative rethinking of the parking lot installation and invent new layouts by arranging virtual (3D models) and tangible (3D prints) images of its elements. Through this gesture of interactive involvement, the artists encourage people to share responsibility and care for public spaces.

Dear visitors, thank you for leaving printed images of infrastructure elements in the exhibition space for other visitors' participation.

You can find a digital version of the installation model at http://commercialpublicart.com/mockup

If you post your layouts on social media, please tag @commercialpublicart. Thank you and have fun!

3D animation 53′40″, sheets, acrylic.
Courtesy of the artists.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

In her new work, Kavelina presents a science fiction video that shows a utopian future world.
without commodity-money relations and unfree labour, where people dedicate themselves to
gaining knowledge and pondering the events of the past. In their studies, they try to
understand why acts of violence took place before and create a comprehensive model of
history, employing the molecular tracing technology. The result they end up with is a general
computer model of the past that is transparent and open to everyone. Subsequently, they
decide to resurrect all of those who had died in Russia's war against Ukraine in order to
restore the lost equality of the past and the present. Members of the future society realise
that the way to heal wounds of the people they have brought back to life is through
prolonged collective grief. Thus, they start collecting traumatic memories, rewriting them and
sharing these experiences throughout the society.

The citizens of the future reconsider the notion of equality, concluding that its true form can
only be achieved through equality between the living and the dead. The video is projected
onto sheets hanging in a place that looks like headquarters of future activists: the room is full
of banners and placards, one of which reads, "Resurrection for everyone".

Real-time digital simulation, fingerprint scanner, eye scanner, microphone, webcams, PC server, monitors, tablet.
Courtesy of the artist.
Produced by PinchukArtCentre.

Installation was made with the support of Photinus Studio and Maajaam residency.
All web-based systems and programming part by Danil Siabro.
Sensors interaction and construction by Ihor Sokolov.
Design and sound support by Dmytro Tentiuk.

In the Decentraland project, Oleksandr Sirous creates digital terraria by collecting data from visitors in Kyiv, Frankfurt am Main, Seoul, Antwerp and other cities. This artwork uses an MMORPG engine and converts the collected data into biomes, aiming to represent them in organic form. Each type of data corresponds to a particular type of living things, such as bugs, mushrooms or plants. Each location where the data are collected has its own type of digital environment that mirrors the natural environment typical for the climate zone of the area. This way, the visitors share the authorship and get immersed in the project: by allowing the artist to use their personal data, they become directly involved in the creation of the environment of a new utopian digital world of universal interaction.

In this work, Sirous warns about the danger brought on by centralised systems such as big data storages and social platforms, which accumulate an immense amounts of power that can potentially allow governments to control users and spread political narratives. By creating this new kind of digital environment, the artist attempts to break free of circular logic and proposes the players to look at the problematic side of common ways of communication.