NEW YORK, NY.- Art at the Institute is presenting “A Radically Different Society,” an installation of contemporary video works created by 26 artists and cooperatives based in Ukraine during the years spanning Euromaidan and the war in Donbas — 2014 to present — capturing Ukrainian society through a dramatic period in its history. Presented by guest curator Lesia Kulchynska, PhD, this exhibition ventures to engage a western audience to encounter slivers of political and social daily life comingled with the blinks of dream-state desires and fears the auteurs bring to normal existence.
Kulchynska, the curator, raises the question whether the exhibited artists’ dreamscapes are also a space(s) of potentiality, where unseen life forms grow, nurture and spread their seeds for a new societal body and existence. Kulchynska states, “The dream for a society that might succeed in a radically different way flashed during the Maidan revolution in practices of spontaneous order, solidarity, and mutual support; in a sense of communality and trust that suddenly united people who never would have previously met. The revolutionary moment of exceptional experience has passed, yet the dream settled in memories, infusing the fantasies and practices of persons and groups, heating tiny utopias somewhere in the urban thickets, nurturing frustrations, as well as political speculation.”
These selected videos illustrate the hidden life of this dream(s), invoking par-allel senses of angst, fatigue, and uncertainty of the turbulent war years. These artists have never been to the front lines, nor have they experienced or witnessed battle. Yet, from 2014 until the present, they have lived near it and in its shadow.
Exhibiting artists: AntiGonna, Piotr Armianovski, Diana Azzuz, Yana Bachynska, Anatoly Belov, Daria Che-chushkova, Fantastic little splash, Ksenia Hnylytska, Boris Kashapov, Alina Kleytman, Taras Kovach and Anna Sorokovaya, Iryna Kudrya, Oksana Kazmina, Maria Kulikovska, Daria Kuzmych, Stan Kvitko, Katya Libkind, Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Himey, Roman Mikhaylov, Oleksiy Radynski, Lena Siyatovska, Tamara Turliun, Alina Yakubenko, and Yuri Yefanov.
Lesia Kulchynska, PhD is a Kyiv-based art curator and visual studies researcher affiliated with the Research Platform of the Pinchuk Art Center (Kyiv) and the Department of Screen and Performance Art Studies at the Rylsky Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Ethnology at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv). She also teaches cultural studies at the Kyiv Academy of Media Arts (written and developed the course, “Vio-lence of the Image”). She worked as a curator at the Visual Culture Research Center / VCRC (2011-2019) and Set Independent Art Space (2019-2020). From 2018-19, Kulchynska was a Fulbright Scholar residing at New York University. Her research interests focus on the theory and history of the image and theory of cinema.
