Andriy Sahaidakovsky. Scenery. Welcome!

[To view a virtual tour of the exhibition, click on the image]

Andriy Sahaidakovsky. Scenery. Welcome! is an exhibition project of Mystetskyi Arsenal, which continues the line of representation of prominent names in the recent history of Ukrainian art, which includes personal exhibitions of Oleg Holosiy, Kirill Protsenko, Oleksandr Hnylytsky. Among those already implemented, Andriy Sahaidakovsky’s project is distinguished by its experimental nature — the space of the Arsenal will be transformed into a total installation created by the artist. This will allow to fully immerse oneself in the artist’s work and to see his method in action.

Curatorial Intro to the Andriy Sahaidakovsky. Scenery. Welcome! Exhibition

Sahaidakovsky’s creative method is based on the use of familiar things in an unusual way. In his work, the artist uses anomalous sounds, pungent and specific odors, “trash” materials, gnarly inscriptions. His installations literally wrap and at the same time split the closed structure of the exhibition space, decontextualize it. Given this, the scenery as a motif of combining the real and the illusion becomes one of the through lines of the exhibition. First of all, the scenery is designed to create a visual image of the “exhibition performance” unfolding in the halls. The viewer has the opportunity to decide how to interpret the informational and semantic components of the set scenery. After all, they allow you to constantly swap the illusion and reality and thus disorient the visitor, to bring a bit of doubt into his or her perception, to turn over the conventional optics of recognizing the visible. Such scenery is like a game with exhibition halls and inside them. It is interesting to wander in space in fascinating anticipation of what will happen next, what will show up in the next halls, what else the author will offer.

The exhibition traces several series of works that are subtly intertwined thematically and stylistically: the body as a fragment, anatomical studies, bodily equilibristics, cinema, children-warriors, and children’s games, sports exercises. It is no coincidence that the main theme of our exhibition is sports. But in this project it is not an illustration of the motto “faster, higher, stronger”, but rather a model of life, a reflection of the concept of homo ludens – “playing human”. The artist enjoys playing his own game, inventing mystified competitions-entertainments. He invents rules, designs scenery for his exercises and disciplines, thus creating his own sports space imaginary, which is aesthetically in tune with the theatre of the absurd.

Andriy Sahaidakovsky was born in 1957 in Lviv. In 1979, he graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of Lviv Polytechnic Institute. In 2012, Andriy Sahaidakovsky became the winner of the First Kyiv International Biennial of Contemporary Art ARSENALE AWARDS in the ARSENALE Discovery category. Lives and works in Lviv.