Critical Archiving Laboratory: explaining the archive of 33 Soshenko st. Art Studios. (with Anna Sorokvaya, Taras Kovach et al.) Installation: archival materials, found objects, texts, 2015
Critical Archiving Laboratory became a long-term project aimed at developing interdisciplinary approaches to the process of archiving and methods of archival representation. The analysis of archival sources related to the history of 33 Soshenko St. Art Studios is was instructed by the concept of social production of space by H. Lefebvre and the principles of interpretative anthropology. Based on an assumption that any space is a social product, Art Studios are dialectically considered as both the means of cultural production process, and the product thereof. This is supported by an analytical distinction of three ways of perceiving space – as abstractly conceived, practically perceived and fully lived. The latter is scrutinized in a micro-historic attempt to explore the manifest cultural forms and adaptive strategies of the Studios’ residents.
Donbass Museum of Contemporary History Public initiative, 2015-2016
"Donbass Museum of Contemporary History" is an attempt to create a participatory museum dedicated to the history of the region. It was founded in 2015 by the initiative group comprising former workers of Luhansk Museum of Local Lore, artists and activists responding to an infrastructural crisis in the museological field caused by the military conflict. DMCH is an alternative museological institution based on expanded understanding of the notion of museum as a place of public discourse. It is designed to facilitate collective comprehension of polarizing historical events and development of non-traditional representational forms. The working method of DMCH is participatory museification – collecting historical evidence, material and digital artifacts from regional communities and group exploration of expositional options. Thus, the narrative-forming museal authority is transferred to the community, potentially liberating the institution from the need to serve as a medium for state ideologemes or private interests of local elites.
Extensive use of dematerialized methods of transmission of historical and socio-cultural information (digital media in particular) is another key principle of DMCH. With museum collections being forcefully relocated and fragmented due to the armed conflict, media artefacts appear as particularly important source of the modern history of Donbass. The main form of DMCH operation at the initial stage is organization the public discussions regarding the possible forms of museological presentation of contemporary history. By calling this yet-virtual initiative a museum, we have no ambition for creating an institution that reproduces (alternative) ideological grand-narratives. Rather, reflecting on discursive nature of social production and preservation of knowledge, we initiate a communicative museological situation. https://www.facebook.com/groups/donbasmuseum/
Study in Institutional Critique Installation (documents, text), 2016 Khmelnytskyi Regional Art Museum
The work consists of three clean blanks displayed at the top of pedestals. These documents of late-Soviet period (printed in 1986) were found in the archive of Khmelnytskyi Regional Art Museum during the research session by the means of random sampling method. To some degree, these artifacts could be considered as specific tools for “desacralization of art”. Such documents help realize one of the main functions of the positivist model of museum: that of gathering and generalization of the products of artistic production. Each object that enters museum undergoes a procedure of valorization and “expert evaluation”, through which a status of an “artwork” (as a thing bearing some aesthetic or historical value) is acquired. The act of evaluation as such cannot be considered outside of a context of institutional authority, making it a political issue. To present clean blanks of documents in a museum space is a gesture of artistic appropriation and an attempt to question the positivist museological model, typical for the modern artistic and sociocultural situation.
A. Lapov
Manifesto Public intervention (text, advertising line) Khmelnitsky Regional Art Museum, 2016
A “crawling line� placed on the facade of an art museum for advertising purposes starts to broadcast the following message (in Ukrainian): "Free citizens! All who care about the fate of collectors and collections - this calling is to you! Let us set the museum free from the market and never let the market within, from whimsical renovations and buffoonery of want, from the precepts of leaders old and new. Let it be the unloved daughter in a family of gain-seekers! Let us protect it as a place of search and comparison, necessity and toil, boredom, as a repository of non-realized futures that is ever late in progress, shyly lingering on the threshold of the Now. Let us unite around its dust and ashes!" L. Lozovoy
Decommunization of Museum Installation: text, photo, archival materials, 2016
“Decommunization…” is an attempt to trace the evolution of exhibition narratives in Mariupol Museum of Local Lore (from the years of fascist occupation to most recent reorganizations in the wake of military conflict in Eastern Ukraine) in order to question the mechanisms of ideological representation and affective influence. A capacity to perform ideological and didactic functions makes modern museum an extremely sensitive institution in times of political turmoil. Museum space is treated a resource for which a struggle is waged between a whole set of actors, each willing to use it as an instrument for spreading their specific agenda. Thus museum becomes a "weak hegemon”, subjugated to more powerful forces and vulnerable in situations of historical uncertainty. Perhaps this is why museum’s immunity to the painful decommunization processes (as envisioned in Ukrainian legislation) proves to be fictional. Museum workers’ attempts to update the contemporary history section of the Mariupol Museum of Local Lore are interrupted by the self-will of radical forces. Paramilitary fighters intervene into the exhibition space, changing the museum narrative in a very unusual way.
Depressurization of Museum Universe Interdisciplinary project, 2013
Luhansk Regional Museum of Local Lore (curator - A. Lapov)
Depressurization is an interdisciplinary museological project aimed at transformation of the functional model of traditional regional museums toward the creation of specific discursive museum environment which can present an alternative to the restrictions of the dominant propagandistic “post-Soviet model”. The main problem, which stimulated this line of activity was the awareness of isolation and inertia Ukrainian museum universe - its hermeticity. The project evolved through different stages: a phase of preliminary work of about 20 contemporary Ukrainian artists exploring the permanent exhibition and the collection; preparation of exhibition integrated into the museum’s halls; a program for discussion.
The final exhibition took place in the Luhans'k Regional Museum of Local Lore in late 2013. A parallel program included some contextrelated events, including presentation of performances specially prepared for the project. The results of project were discussed during several meetings and a concluding roundtable with museum workers, artists, journalists and local cultural activists. Each thematic part of the Depressurization could be considered a prototype for the future development of permanent exhibition and, simultaneously, a proposal for further collaboration and knowledge exchange between museum workers and contemporary artists, designers and cultural managers.
Web catalogue of the project: http://rmu.crevv.com
Three questions to the “Occupation and Resistance Movement in the Great Patriotic War” exhibition hall Installation: text, photos Melitopol Museum of Local Lore, 2015
The work is an attempt to explore the notion of museum as an ideological state apparatus entwined in the relations of power. Despite numerous updates during the period of Ukraine’s independence, the exhibition of Melitopol Museum Of Local Lore retains lingering vestiges of the grand-narratives of the past. The act of questioning may expose them, contributing to the reexamination of the concept of ideological representation. L. Lozovoy
Critical Archiving Laboratory is an interdisciplinary research group, formed in 2015 in Kiev. Its activities are aimed at the development of non-conventional forms of archival representation, and creation of communicative museological situations. Engaged in a broad thematic field (from analysis of late-Soviet museology to the critical assessment of the notion of "contemporary history"), the Lavoratory is constantly searching for relevant methods of artistic research and presentation, acting at the intersection of historical, anthropological and new media practices.
Activities and Exhibitions 2015 – Common Frontier Exhibition, a part of “The School of Kyiv” International Biennial // 33 Soshenko st. Art Studios (Kyiv, Ukraine) 2015 – «Donbass Museum of Contemporary History» public discussion // Ukrainian Crisis Media Centre, (Severodonetsk, Ukraine) 2016 – Museum: Cornerstones Exhibition // Khmelnytskyi Regional Art Museum (Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine) 2016 – Exhibition "DE NE DE": decommunization processes in Ukraine through the eyes of contemporary artists // Ukrainian Institute of Scientific, Technical and Economic Information (Kyiv, Ukraine) 2016 – “Museum: a media exodus?” public discussion // Ukrainian Institute of Scientific, Technical and Economic Information (Kyiv, Ukraine) 2016 – Residency at Biruchiy Contemporary Art Project (Ukraine) 2016 – Lecture “Post-Soviet Museology: Between Ideological Rock and a Hard Place of Entertainment” // Barriera (Turin, Italy) Publications 2016 - “ Donbass Museum of Contemporary History ” // “IDIalogiya” [zine] (Saint-Petersburg, Russia) 2016 - Towards the History of Donbass Art-Collectives // Dependence Degree, 2017 (Wroclaw, Poland) Contact: mckrvch@gmail.com larion.lozovoy@gmail.com