The exhibition “Kylym. Contemporary Ukrainian Artists”, that was held from April to the early June in Carpathian village of Tatariv (Ivano-Frankivsk region), will be in Lviv since late June until the end of July, and after that will move to Kyiv and Kharkiv, is important not only for the Zenko Foundation, as an organizer, but for the whole Ukrainian art scene as well. For the foundation, this project is the second after its debut — “Ukrainian Contemporary Art. From Private Collections”. “Kylym” is the first all-Ukrainian project for the Zenko Foundation. It not only upholds the height of the debut, but to some point excels it. We are demonstrating a will to develop and to peer into the future. To find out, what the art of Ukraine will look like tomorrow, it is enough to look at the works of young painters today. In fact, exactly this is one of our goals with this project. And for this very reason, the project is important for the whole Ukrainian art scene, as it is a possibility to show the works of the most promising young artists (median age of the participants is 25-30 years) to a broader audience. The second goal of “Kylym” is to once again convincingly demonstrate, that it’s not only the capital, where interesting art events happen. This is why the project got underway in Tatariv, a home place for the main art space of the Zenko Foundation. Cultural decentralization, by the way, is another prediction, that can be made for Europe as whole, and for Ukrainian art scene in particular.
Co-founder of Zenko Foundation
Adrian Aftanaziv
In the first part of the project, exhibited in the Carpathians, took part 17 authors, each with an own view of how traditional art should look in the modern world. Most of the works, presented in the “Kylym� were created specifically for this project. The exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, installations, and video art.
The main idea of the project “Kylym” is to unite traditional and contemporary art, bring the ethnic culture up to date and to enrich contemporary art with new “folk” meanings.
One of the special features of the project is that it was incepted as a travelling exhibition. After the Carpathians, “Kylym� would head to Lviv, and then to Kyiv and Kharkiv. And in each of this places it would grow and change, as by means of adding new works by existing authors, so by including new artists to participants.
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IHOR ABRAMOVICH
curator
The history of the carpet (“kylym” from Ukrainian means “woven carpet”) is just about as old as the proto-origins of civilization. Ever since, as tradition demands, the weaving of the carpet means enclosing in its ornaments, along with the secret warmth of heart, both nationally peculiar and universally human notions about happiness and beauty, life and death, whole successions and layers of deepest values, connected with anthropo-cosmological worldview of a human, and first-priority forces of human life, which are in fact the very living canvas of the history. A carpet is a fixture of common living space, a detail inside every dwelling. Its meaning is both practical and symbolical: it acts as a provider of heat and decoration, but mostly of protection - it is an amulet. Today we are not very conscious of those meanings, quietly simmering in traditional ornaments. But a contemporary artist, despite having completely different modern context, different problems, and different goals, than those of the folk masters, also thinks in images and symbols, using them to lay new, but still rich range of reformed meanings and motives - traditional and contemporary. Akin to a carpet, that includes symbols of different meanings and always has two sides - front and back, contemporary art reflects different parts of reality - aesthetic and idiomatic, positive and negative, it’s obverse and converse. Perpetually important themes of life and death, inconsistencies of human fate, coded in the patterns of carpet, are especially sharp during present dramatic and violent times for our country. Surely, this explosive dynamics is caused by periodic socio-political paroxysms leading to wars and revolutions. In
OLEKSANDER SOLOVYOV
curator
accordance, Ukrainian contemporary art resides in the permanent transitional state, impossible to cram into any convincing and firm definitions, characteristics, and generalizations. For example, the “new young”, that appeared recently on Ukrainian art scene, build their own search athwart the above-mentioned determinism, claiming the idea of aesthetic autonomy instead of the collective rapid response. The denial of publicity is also getting more noticeable - it is countered with selfimmersion so deep, that immediate political reference is dimmed, being mutated into biopolitics, which means - the existential problematics is once again on-time. The inevitable exposure of the “wounds of reality” is more and more seldom viewed as social therapy, further turning into an openly-grim artistic fixation. This torn consciousness violates and confuses the established status quo, leading the usual circulation of events, into the realm of irreversible, almost catastrophic interpenetration that allows to display on one surface different times and ideological models in quite pressed blitz-historic reciprocity. This principle of collecting different times in a focus, where incommensurable coincide, is a vibrant sign of posttraumatic times, just what the Ukrainian transitive “today” is - a vast roar of voices and thoughts in their sore confusion. Gathered around and formed by a common idea of the project, its expressive and complete conception, individual statements of a group of young Ukrainian artists, so dissimilar by their content, nevertheless form a surprisingly unified “weaved canvas”, multi-dimensional “carpet”, filled with symbols: endlessly changeable in its unstoppable movement, but still perfectly self-sufficient, living organism.
PARTICIPANTS Kateryna Berlova
Roman Minin
Nazar Bilyk
Roman Mykhailov
Myroslav Vayda
Serhiy Petlyuk
Artem Volokitin
Yuriy Pikul
Oleksiy Zolotariov
Stepan Ryabchenko
Darya Koltsova
Oleksiy Sai
Anton Logov
Andriy Sydorenko
Tetyana Malynovska
Hanna Sorokova Oleksiy Yalovega
PROJECT PARTNERS
Zenko Foundation was established in 2015. The main mission of this art institution is to support and promote contemporary Ukrainian art. The collection of Zenko Foundation includes more than 200 works of contemporary Ukrainian art. The debut project of the foundation was the exhibition “Contemporary Ukrainian Art. From Private Collections” (October 2015-March 2016, hotel complex “Koruna” art space). In April of 2016 in Zenko Foundation art space in the Carpathians started the second project “Kylym. Contemporary Ukrainian Artists”. The project was established as all-Ukrainian and after its launch in the Carpathians during the year was travelling to Lviv, Kyiv, and Kharkiv. The main directions of development for Zenko Foundation are the exposition program that involves exhibitions at the venues of Zenko Foundation, supporting Ukrainian artists in huge national and international projects, contemporary art auctions. The publishing program, that aims to inform the public in Ukraine and abroad about Ukrainian art-process. This April the foundation took part in a publishing project “Ukrainian Art Book”. In May Zenko Foundation became the official partner of the “Gala Europe” concert, that was organized during the Days of Europe in Ukraine with the support of Italian Culture Institute in Ukraine and was dedicated to the celebration of the 70th anniversary of Italian Republic. info@zenkofoundation.com www.zenkofoundation.com zenkofoundation @zenkofoundation
TEAM
Zenko Foundation Curators Ihor Abramovych Oleksandr Solovyov Project coordination Adrian Aftanaziv
PR Yulia Kuprina Design Serhiy Fedynyak
Photo Andaction Volodymyr Volchonkov Logistics Artur Antonenko