5 years ago
Voloshyn Gallery presents a group project of Nikita Kadan, Lesia Khomenko, Oleksiy Sai, Mykola Ridnyi, Nikolay Karabinovych, Yevgen Samborsky, Vlada Ralko, and Volodymyr Budnikov in honor of the 5th anniversary of Voloshyn gallery.
"5 years ago" – is the price of visualization of the interchange of the past and the present, where the exposition is the research of time and space, their fixation at the same time, which is important for the establishment and cultivation of a new experience through the lens of the past.
At the exhibition "5 years ago" there will be art objects presented by the authors in 2016, at the time of the Voloshyn Gallery foundation, to look at them through the five years that have passed. Some of the pieces were created by the artists within the series, some of them – in between the series and separately as well. Deliberately pulling works out of their context, depriving them of a common theme, we revise important testimonies about the past, we draw attention to what could have remained secondary in the past. The exposition becomes a point of comparison between "yesterday" and "today".
Works from the joint series of Vlada Ralko and Volodymyr Budnikov "Line of demarcation" were created in real-time during the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine, where the usual borders turned into lines of high tension or lines of new cruelty. Also, the line of war reminds more of a line in drawing or writing, where objects or words are made visible only by the line. The graphics by Nikita Kadan from the Branch series of works, where the author refers to the history of mass violence and the Holocaust in the Ukrainian territories in the 1930s-40s, enter the dialogue with the work of Volodymyr Budnikov increasing tension. Nikita in his works tries to record true events as evidence for viewers of the future. Today, being embedded in a new political ideology, they talk more about the impossibility of testifying, perplex, and create completely false interpretations.
The series "Bombed" by Oleksiy Sai arises as a kind of reaction of art to events, where the author, destroying old works, creates an image of the bombing landscapes of Ukraine from a bird's eye view.
A series of sculptures by Mykola Ridnyi continues the theme of time recording and refers to various architectural forms: government buildings, street markets, residential buildings, or vehicles. They all have one thing in common - the flag. The artist reflects on the latest changes in the perception of national symbols in Ukraine, when the national flags and symbols present everywhere have acquired special political and historical significance. Erasing the differences in details and colors with black paint, he critically comprehends the logic of the latest political shifts, in which the architectural base, its history, cultural context, and social functions are becoming less significant than the manifestation of national colors on its surface.
Yevgen Samborsky presents his work "Landscape with a Description on It", which he created on the works of students of the Institute of Arts, who stole while studying there. In the description of the work, in which the artist deliberately makes part of the content of the work, Yevgenindicates the date as a kind of the point of no return. Nikolay Karabinovych in his work "Life is art .." literally speaks of how art relates to real life. And there is a question hidden in his statement. The work of Lesia Khomenko from the series "Author's Copy" continues the theme of time, where the artist reproduced her already known works, but at the same time provided the copy with the status of the original. The artist deliberately interprets the originals, speaking of time with the help of visual distortions and deformations. By capturing partial displacements when citing her works, the artist defines a new context for their presentation.
It is also important to mention here the role of the gallery, which forms its double meaning of the exhibition. On behalf of the institution, we are talking about a system of art, in which works become more important over time, and not only commercial-wise, they become museum pieces. Furthermore, at the same time, these works are nothing more than evidence of the time, according to which it is possible to write not only the history of art but also to analyze socio-political and socio-cultural transformations.
The exhibition will run from October 20 till November 14, 2021.
Voloshyn Gallery, Tereshchenkivska Str. 13.
