Open Studios Ausstellung, kuratiert von Anna Mirbach und Masha…

„Assembly Scheme“, Ausstellung im M17 Art Center, Kyiv, 9.11.2023…

Als Resultat der Zusammenarbeit im Instytut Avtomatyki wurden wir von NAHIRNA22 eingeladen an der Ausstellung „Assembly Scheme“ im M17 Art Center teilzunehmen. Die Ausstellung zeigt Positionen aller Künstler*innen die seit beginn des Krieges unter dem Dach des Instytut Avtomatyki arbeiten.

The Assembly Scheme project focuses on the phenomenon of the Kyiv Institute of Automation, the art hub, that emerged spontaneously in the building at 22 Nahirna Street. The exhibition brings together 60 artists representing a self-organised community of artists, which is a living organism that develops and transforms, triggering new ideas and reflections of the artists.

The exhibition at the M17 CAC has no chronological sequence and serves as a type of model for an assembly: a symbolic scheme where a set of elements, details, events, is assembled in the viewer’s perception into a coherent structure.

The project is organized by the M17 Contemporary Art Center, Nahirna 22 NGO, Art Support Fund.

The curatorial team:
Svitlana Ahranovska
Yuriy Bolsa
Oleksandr Bohomaz
Nikita Vlasov
Andriy Pidlisnyi
Maksym Mazur

Administrative team:
Marta Nyrkova
Molly Route
Sabina Magnitofon

Join us for the opening on Thursday, 9 November 2023
📍Kyiv, 102-104 V. Antonovycha St.
Free admission to the opening

Unser Text für die Ausstellung:

„Ich komme und sehe”.

Nine artists from Berlin, Düsseldorf and Leipzig have been working at Instytut Avtomatyki “Common Space” since April 2023, as part of the residency project “Ich komme und sehe”.

The project enables artists based in Germany to work at Kyiv’s Instytut Avtomatyki for one month and to interact with the Kyiv art scene, especially the artists of NAHIRNA22.  Its aim is to foster dialogue and artistic exchange.

At the start of the full-scale invasion many Ukrainian artists were forced to move their studio westwards, although of course very few western artists have come to work in Ukraine. This is true especially for non-journalistic forms of practice from western artists, which seem to be almost absent.  This matters because the languages of journalistic practices are quite different from Fine Art which stores different information in different forms. 

The ‘Ich komme und sehe’ Residency program attempts to address this issue.  But there is a related question here – how is an outsider’s perspective supposed to inform or benefit the experiences of someone living at a time of national crisis?  No one can claim that a group of German artists can feel what Ukrainians are feeling or know as much about the situation as a Ukrainian on the streets of Kyiv. Indeed, this exhibition makes no such claim, rather it seeks to share perspectives as a good thing in and of itself.

Some of the participating artists have been working in Ukraine for many years and some were even born in Ukraine. Others are in Kyiv for the first time. The exhibition features work at differing stages, from finished artworks to the results of experimental research processes. Each one is reflecting the question of how to deal with this serious reality in their art.  Whilst there is no overarching concept to this exhibition, the uniting factor is that all the participating artists were willing and interested to work in Kyiv, in the reality of being at the edge of war. And to tell the story of what they see, in their art.  This exhibition is thus both an act of witness as well as one of solidarity.

The works shown in this exhibition have mostly been created in and around Instytut Avtomatyki this summer 2023 and are inspired by the art, discussions and cooperative exhibitions with the artists of the art group NAHIRNA22. The residency “Ich komme und sehe” was created and organized by the painter Paul Maciejowski. It is funded by the Kunststiftung North Rhine Westphalia, Ministry of Culture and Sciences North Rhine Westphalia, Germany, European Union Culture Moves Europe Fund and The Goethe Institute.

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