KYIV.- In 1997, a rare opportunity arose to work with the artist Jannis Kounellis in Kyiv within the apse of what was, at that time, the Soros Center for Contemporary Art, housed in a renovated baroque-era building that had served as the original location of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Kounellis’s proposal was simple yet expansive—an intervention comprising steel I-beams mounted along the length of the nave from which would hang a series of church bells. Kounellis’s only conditions for the bells were that they be historic in origin and made in Ukraine. The artist’s plan corresponded with his role as a central figure of the Arte Povera movement, which possessed, according to Germano Celant, “a new attitude for taking repossession of a ‘real’ dominion over our existence [leading] the artist towards continual forays outside of the places assigned to him.”

Throughout the project, Kounellis often spoke about Ukraine’s avant-garde prior to and after 1917. Discussions ventured into the writings of Ukrainian painter David Burliuk, who characterized “deconstruction as the opposite of construction” and believed in the ability of construction to be “shifted or displaced.” Burliuk revived the term facture (a reference to the texture of a painting’s surface) to infer a process of investigation of materiality. While it was perhaps not recognized by Kounellis as such, his observations and perspectives recalled these historical inquiries—particularly in his professing that “painting has a capacity for synthesis, so an idea of composing in space, all paintings have an order of composition that is always more ancient than they are.”

Reconstructing Kounellis’s work from 1997 in Ukraine today is to recognize that Kounellis was an artist informed by war, having lived through World War II and the Greek Civil War. His integration of industrialized materials common to wartime production as remnants of destruction, spoke as much to the postwar human condition as it did to fracture and disruption. As the artist noted, “since the war, we have only contradictions.”

Amid a continuing war waged by Russia, the resurrection and reconstitution of this project in June 2025 stands as a gesture toward the autonomy of art and life. The original project was one of contradictions, and the procurement of the bells remains enigmatic (and was made possible only through some sleuthing by an architectural historian from the western region of Ukraine). Nevertheless, Kounellis’s work made evident that the church bell represented a dialectical object. For this iteration, the origin of the bells is transparent and cooperative—the Museum of the Bells, within Lubart’s Castle in Lutsk, has loaned fourteen examples, dating from 1688 to 1925, from both Orthodox and Catholic origins, and from various regions of Ukraine. In addition, bells have been generously loaned by Kyiv’s St. Sophia Cathedral. And—as was requested by the artist in 1997—clappers have been cast for those bells for which none exist, not for the purpose of being rung, but to reestablish the potential of their resonance.

Jannis Kounellis Untitled, 1997/2025 is curated by Marta Kuzma, Artistic Director and Chief Curator, Faktura 10, and Professor of Art at the Yale School of Art. The project has been made possible through the cooperation of the Archivio Kounellis in Rome, the Museum of the Bells in Lutsk, St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, and the National University of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv, Ukraine. The original project was also curated by Marta Kuzma, then the Founding Director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv (1990–2000) in cooperation with Nicolo Asta and Giulio Alessandri.