Voloshyn Gallery presents «Excavations from the Future» – Mykola Ridnyi's solo exhibition. The exhibition will feature both new and older works by the artist, which weren’t previously known to the wider audience. This is the first solo exhibition of Mykola Ridnyі in Kyiv since 2014. The exhibition coincides with a period of the breakdown of decades and a “big pause”. Time itself and its perception are one of the main subjects of the exhibition.
In a new series of graphic images, the artist sketches the theses and thoughts of such theorists as Vladislav Strzheminsky, Michel Foucault, and Brian Massumi, turning everything the viewer needs to solve into puzzles. In works from the series Blind Spot (2015) and Gradual Loss of Vision (2017), the artist turns to ophthalmology, the science of vision, to explain the perception of war. A blind spot in a person's vision appears only as a result of the loss of vision, which recalls the influence of the invisible on the real in Massumi's philosophical theory.
The exhibition of sculptures created about 10 years ago though never shown to the audience is also very symbolic. Sculptures, as well as visual collages, are tied to medicine. In this case, it is all about the combination of the phenomena of odontology (the science of the dental-jaw system) and the Anthropocene (the science of human influence on the environment).It is important to discourage the notion of the "big pause" behind which there is even greater acceleration, the exhibition offers a look at the presence of the future with its obvious problems here and now. However, it was created not for the sake of intimidation or apocalyptic optics promotion, but for the acknowledging of invisible, but quite possible scenarios of life.
Mykola Ridnyi was born in Kharkiv (1985), lives and works in Kyiv. In 2005 he became a co-founder of the SOSka group and the gallery-laboratory of the same name in Kharkiv. He works with photography, video, collage, installation, and sculpture. He was a curator of several art projects, one of which - "Armed and Dangerous" (2019) exists in the form of a video exhibition, almanac, and online platform.The artist participated in the National Pavilion of Ukraine at the Venice Biennale (2013, 2015), as well as in the main project of the Biennale "All the World's Futures" (2015). His work "Lost Baggage" (2019), created for the 12th Biennale in Kaunas, was included in the permanent exhibition of the IX Fort Holocaust Memorial Museum. Other works of the artist are in the public collections of the Pinakothek of Modernity in Munich, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Warsaw Museum of Contemporary Art, Ludwig Museum in Budapest, and others.