Rare Scraps
Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to present “Rare Scraps” by the Ukrainian artist collective Open Group curated by Marta Czyż. Open Group was founded in 2012 by six artists, and since 2019 the group has consisted of three core members: Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga.
The exhibition explores themes that have shaped Open Group’s practice since its founding: collective work and memory, the limits of artistic gesture, and the reimagining of spaces where art belongs. Rooted in conceptual art, performance, and relational practices, the group approaches collectivity not merely as a way of organizing work, but as a key artistic method.
The exhibition’s title, “Rare Scraps,” refers rather to fragments of works that become clues leading to the work’s full narrative. What remains as “scraps” are fragments of experiences, gestures, and stories, where “rare” lends them special value and prevents them from being overlooked or forgotten. Often, a work's meaning lies in what is fragmentary and seemingly insignificant. In this case, the title may also reflect their artistic practice, where traces, ideas, and experience are inseparable, and their relationships need not be predetermined. In “Rare Scraps,” Open Group does not reconstruct complete stories; rather, it preserves theirfincompleteness.
Open Group’s works are often extended projects with a set development and an open-ended finale, often taking the form of a term they coined themselves: “open situation”, experimental arrangements in which people and spaces meet, and meaning emerges through participation. For Open Group, art does not exist within a closed, institutional space; it is often created not by objects but bysituations, staged encounters, and actions, and, as cartographers, they map the space of art in an alternative way, according to their own rules. Often, they begin with a single, simple gesture that, in the process, becomes an elaborate narrative—a story of community and memory—defining space through social presence. They often work with metaphors, seeking a physical form of expression or trying to visualize a state of endless uncertainty.
Collectivity was one of the methods that set the 2000s Ukrainian art scene apart, as a result of the Post-Socialist system and the absence of institutions and an art market. By placing the concept of “collective work” at the center of their practice, the artists create collaborative projects with people from diverse backgrounds, realized in specific contexts and at specific times. Community here is neither given nor stable; it reveals itself as a relationship that must be constantly negotiated.
In many of Open Group’s projects, time plays a particularly important role. A project does not end with its first presentation, but remains an ongoing process whose subsequent stages are recorded, repeated, transformed, or taken up by others. Many of the collective’s projects now take on a life of their own, primarily through documentation. Documentation is therefore not merely a record of an activity, but often becomes an integral part of it, a testament to presence, encounters, and what took place between people. The exhibition features works created since 2012, when the collective was founded. Projects from the early years of their activity, up to 2015, focused primarily on exploring various discourses concerning core paradigms of art, such as authorship, conditions of making and exhibiting art. Since 2015, their practice has expanded into a broader reflection on functioning during wartime. This theme gradually radicalized the artists’ perspective, shifting the focus from institutional issues toward questions of the experience of violence, memory, loss, and survival.
The “Rare Scraps” exhibition also refers to the selective and fragmentary nature of memory. Every event carries with it a memory that never fully reconstructs it. It remains a collection of traces, images, and material remnants. Over time, these too change and take on new meanings. Some experiences fade, while others become more vivid. Memory has an indefinite scope and often operates disproportionately to the original experiences. In the context of war, these fragments take on special significance: they can be anything that has survived from a given place, relationship, or moment of shared life.
Text by Pavlo Kovach