Cultural Itinerary for the week of July 3 – 10
Each week ART UKRAINE sets the cultural itinerary and takes you on a tour of cultural events that are set to open or have just recently opened. This week’s tour is packed once again: with exhibition openings, film screenings, lectures, and public discussions galore.
July 3rd, 4th, and 5th mark the final three days of the multi-disciplinary ZHOVTI ZVUK (Eng., “Golden Sound”) project at the Shcherbenko Art Centre. The visual artwork of Daria Kuzmych, Artem Andreychuk, Hrytsia Erde, Tenpoint, and Yevhen Bal is at the heat of the project, which depicts the artist as individual and experimenter ever in search of the ultimate medium of expression for his ideas, and finding it, this time, in a new mode – accompanied by live music. So this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday you will get a chance to see the work while listening to the live musical offerings of 5 Vymir, BADIAN Sauna System and Tenpoint, and Tanya Tanya. Each night the concert starts at 7:30 p.m.
Also tonight, the Pinchuk ArtCentre will be screening Peter Lom’s 2012 film, “Back to the Square” at 7:30 p.m. The documentary tracks the lives of five people who suffered at the hands of the new Egyptian post-revolutionary military government. Despite regime change, the violence and terror tactics which marked the Mubarak period remain. Army and secret police have arrested more than 12,000 protesters, tried them at military tribunals, and often subjected them to torture. Shooting in Egypt since the start of the revolution in January, the creative team of “Back to the Square” has drawn inspiration from the unprecedented events of the Arab Spring. And yet, a year later, they are outraged by the ongoing human rights’ abuses being reported daily out of Egypt.
Today at Kharkiv’s Yermilov Center – the Opening of the KONTRAPUNKT Exhibition, featuring over 100 paintings – experimental still lifes, urban landscapes, and other compositions – by students of the Kharkiv National Building and Architecture University and the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts. Recent years have seen exhibits tend toward an elevated nihilism in both craft and ethos. “We’re working to revive the traditions of creative experimentation and the formal culture of the Ukrainian and Russian avant-garde, introducing two original instruction tracks into university curriculum. Using this academically sound method of instruction, we aim to spur students to think outside the box, and cultivate more creatively diverse sketchwork…and lay down a solid, formal, cultural base,” – Oleksandr Zholud.
Through this contribution of their academic expertise, Yevhen Svitlychnyi and Oleksandr Zholud are directly enabling their students to express their individuality, and the proof is in the KontraPunkt exhibit.
On July 4th, at 4:00 p.m. the Lviv Andrey Sheptytytskyi National Museum will hold the Opening of the “Yavorivshchyna” (Yavoriv Country) Exhibition. The exhibit celebrates Yavoriv folk art of the 19th through the early 21st centuries. These works, taken together with the folk cultural production of other regions of the country – Hutsul Country, Pokuttia, Polissia, Volyn, Poltava, Slobozhan, and others – form the core of Ukrainian national self-expression.
To give a full overview of Yavoriv folk art, the exposition will feature folk dress, fabrics and fabric weaving, embroidery, ceramics, pysanky egg painting, toymaking, reed basket weaving, and Yavoriv wooden chest ornamental painting.
Saturday, July 5th the National Art Museum of Ukraine will open an exhibit of the works of Anatoly Sumar, which includes paintings he created prior to 1963, his “Color and Music” cycle from the mid-60s, and works painted post-1989. The exhibit will shed light not only on this painter, but on that era in which he worked. In addition, there will be an education program and the presentation during the exhibit of the monograph entitled “Anatoly Sumar”.
On July 5th , Kyiv’s Pinchuk Art Center will host a lecture by media-arts researcher Yanina Prudenko entitled “New Tactics of New Media”. For her talk, Prudenko calls on the seminal research of media theorist Marshall McLuhan included in his 1964 work “Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man.” Here McLuhan pointed out that it is artists, working as they do in the field of human experience, are the first to grasp the importance of new technologies, and to approach them without bias, envisioning their potential in the service of art. The lecture will touch on the infatuation with modern media forms, and its ingress into the emotional sphere where contemporary artists and curators employ it largely as public manifest – a means of addressing society on the vital issues and crises facing it.
July 8th – at 7:00 p.m. the Pinchuk ArtCentre will host a public discussion on “Mass Media Designed Reality”, facilitated by the journalist Katerina Syegatskova.
July 9th – at 7:30 p.m., the Mystetskyi Arsenal’s “Small Gallery” and the Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Festival will screen the Russian-Austrian film “ELEKTRO MOSCOW”, during the Ujif_notfound and Dmytro Kornienko event entitled RECT_STRUCT: emotions/algoritms. The film is a 2013 work by co-directors Elena Tikhonova and Dominik Spritzendorfer.
Also on July 9th, at Kyiv’s “YA Gallery”, Yevhen Ravskyi will present his new series built on Homeric Greek poetry. Following the “Old New Masters” format, the artist brings together three languages – that of the Homeric Epic, an echo of Caravaggio, and the unbridled language of contemporary art. The dueling grounds are Lviv’s Armenian Street and the players largely Lviv artists. The project author tries to explain: “To just re-do “The Iliad” didn’t make any sense. I wanted to show this in our own time, and lift the veil on just who these characters were.”
Just a reminder that the there is still time to submit works to the Stedley Art Foundation’s III Art Criticism contest. To take part, send your work to artcriticcontest@gmail.com. Open to all would-be critics under the age of 30. For more info on contest terms and conditions CLICK HERE.
