On June 8th, the Laboratory of Contemporary Art ‘Mala Gallery of the Mystetskyi Arsenal’ will present the exhibition of artist Nadya Sayapina Letter to mother.

It is a white sheet of paper in front of me. Inside it there are so many words and images that I want to express, turn them into writing. I want to write in such a way that everyone would understand me and nothing would be distorted. But the multiplicity of views and perceptions can create as many readings as there are readers. And sometimes I’m scared that my words can be easily twisted, that they can hurt others. I can’t help but write, because writing for me means not losing touch with those who are not near — mother, dad, my love, friend or foe. Writing means to structure my experience, to give it away out, to relive it again, and to look from the side. On a piece of paper, I can at least ephemerally regain what I have lost — my home. I still write letters, collect strangers’ letters, which form a long archive of different experiences and stories. When I try to think about why I’m still writing letters, I realize that I still have little hope of getting an answer.

The project Letter to mother is ​​based on the stories of people who had to leave Belarus and build their life in a new place. At the heart of the project are thirty interviews of people from Belarus, which the artist has been collecting for several months. The project reveals the affective side of the resettlement — personal experiences, feelings of home loss, helplessness and confusion, fear, uncertainty, and guilt. The exhibition presents a view on the common/different things that the project participants have experienced.

As a part of the exhibition, Nadia conducted a group workshop, where she invited locals to interact with the letters from project participants and to write their own letters or draw pictures about what people from Belarus lack in their new place. Inside the exhibition space, each viewer can become a part of the project and create their own drawing or text on the basis of the letters placed here. Through the practice of co-writing and drawing, the artist appeals to the sharing of painful experiences and empathy and creates a space for further dialogue.

The project was implemented in the course of the artist’s residency organized by Mystetskyi Arsenal and Goethe-Institut in Ukraine.

Curator: Natasha Chychasova.
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Nadia Sayapina is an artist and art tutor who works with different media — performance, multimedia, installations, painting, text, art therapy. In her practice, she focuses on mediation practices as an opportunity to express the voices of “others”. On September 7th, 2020, the artist was detained at home and sentenced to 15 days for participating in collective artistic action against violence. In October, Sayapina left Belarus. Now she is based in Kyiv.

The exhibition will be open for visiting from June 8th to July 4th, 2021.
Free entrance.

Open hours:
Tuesday-Sunday, 12:00 – 20:00
Monday – closed

On April 16, the Laboratory of Contemporary Art Mala Gallery of the Mystetskyi Arsenal will present online the exhibition of British artist Mark Neville Port Glasgow and other projects.

The exhibition will feature selected works from seven projects representing the artist’s creative practice over the past 18 years. The presented works illustrate Neville’s activist artistic approach, which is based on close interaction with the communities at the centre of his focus. Neville often makes photo books, employing a strategy of targeted dissemination through which the artist subverts the conventional relationship between art and its subjects. Neville establishes a democratic and ‘horizontal’ kind of communication with his subject; his books primarily exist for and serve the communities he documents.

Mark Neville’s first such project was The Port Glasgow Book Project (2004). For a year he worked in Port Glasgow, which sixty years ago was a world centre for shipbuilding. The resulting book became a kind of social document about the life of the working community of the town. To disseminate it, the artist engaged the local football club boys, who delivered 8,000 copies of the book to each household in the town in a week. The book itself could not be purchased in stores or ordered by mail. In this way, Neville undermined the traditional form and perception of the photobook as ‘art’ and gave the local community ownership of it.

Neville has been researching the Ukrainian context for several years. He describes his journey as follows: “My relationship with Ukraine began in 2015 when Kyiv Military Hospital contacted me to request a Ukrainian language version of my book about mental health issues in the British military, Battle Against Stigma. They wanted to give them out to their patients who were wounded both physically and psychologically after their time on the frontline. I was really impressed that Ukraine would be so forward-thinking in its desire to understand and treat adjustment disorder”.

His work in Ukraine includes the series of photographs Displaced Ukrainians (2018) commissioned by the Centre for Eastern European and International Studies (ZOiS), Berlin, and a series Voyages: Odesa (2017) commissioned by The New York Times Magazine (both these series were presented at the exhibition Obabich at Mystetskyi Arsenal). In August 2021, Steidl will publish Mark Neville’s book on Ukraine Stop Tanks with Books.

Curator — Max Gorbatskyi.

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British artist Mark Neville works at the intersection of art and documentary, investigating the social function of photography. He makes lens-based works that have been realised and disseminated in a large array of contexts, as both still and moving image pieces, slideshows, films, and giveaway books. His work has consistently looked to subvert the traditional role of social documentary practice. Often working with closely-knit communities, in a collaborative process intended to be of direct, practical benefit to the subject, his photographic projects to date have frequently made the towns he portrays the primary audience for the work. He has been nominated for The Pulitzer Prize by The New York Times Magazine in 2012 for the photo essay Here is London, for the Aperture Photobook Award 2017 for the Steidl monograph Fancy Pictures, and for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Award 2020 for his book Parade. In 2020 Neville relocated from London, his place of birth, to live in Kyiv.

The exhibition will be open from April 17 to May 30, 2021.
Free entrance.

Open hours:
Tuesday-Sunday, 12:00 – 20:00
Monday – closed

*Please note. Due to the pandemic situation, the opening dates may change, so stay tuned for updates on our Facebook page and stay safe.

As part of the Month of Lithuanian Photography in Kyiv, the Laboratory of Contemporary Art Mala Gallery will present the Lost Time exhibition, curated by Darius Vaichekauskas.

With the development of technology, means of reflection and transmission of reality, photography moves away from a purely technical function and into a sphere of post-photography. Consequently, photography becomes a source of philosophical meanings and interpretations. Post-photography is characterized by constant manipulation of the image (editing, drawing, deconstruction). It forces us to reconsider the phenomenon of “photography,” which has virtually ceased to exist as a “real-time referent.”

The group exhibition of contemporary Lithuanian photography shows several approaches and interpretations of the post-photography subject. Aurelia Maknite, Darius Vaichekauskas, Vytautas Kumža, Valentin Odnovjun, Deauville Dagene, and Juozapas Kalnius explore completely different photographic strategies.

Vytautas Kumža focuses on the first stage of photo development, which he finds much more interesting than rendering or post-processing images. Valentin Odnovjun, in his Process series, shows photographs of discarded photo paper pieces found in the photo laboratory at the Patarei prison in Tallinn, Estonia. Deauville Dagene presents photographs that give the impression of a witness of place and time. However, they are filled with memory. Juozapas Kalnius uses the technique of shooting without a camera to display the shadows of household objects on folded silver-gelatin paper. In the Deconstruction series, Darius Vaichekauskas, in the title of each work, refers to the author of the original work (photograph, book, photo album), used for a visual collage. And in the Burning Slides series by Aurelia Maknite, images from other people’s archives are being transformed impacted by flame. Nature, cityscapes, memory are being changed into abstractness.

Curator: Darius Vaichekauskas

The exhibition will run from September 25 to October 25

Gallery opening hours: Tuesday—Sunday, 12:00-20:00. Closed on Mondays.

Due to the adaptive quarantine continuation in Ukraine, we ask you to follow the rules and recommendations for your safety! Please be sure to wear a face mask or respirator while in the gallery or at Mystetskyi Arsenal.

Through the act of giving a name for something, humanity is grasping the world. People give names, characteristics for some phenomena and objects from which they construct a clear map of the environment. A map that gives peace, holistic vision and is legitimizing the position of power and control. Naming becomes an act of appropriation, and its objects become a resource. In the case of potential value, this resource is marked as important and used, while others, less useful, are destroyed. However, how does mastering and fitting bring us closer to understanding the environment?

NHT is a presentation of a long-term research project of the interdisciplinary group Ruїns collective, initiated by artists Teta Tsybulnyk and Elias Parvulesko. They are based on observation and immersion in the environment and deconstruction of sustainable views on it. During the artistic research they turn to the expedition as a way to immerse and inhabit the place / phenomenon of observation. A body of work which formed a video Non human trilogy came as the result of a deep dive into thorough search. Continuing the line of their own search, artists explore the environment with the help of sound – as a way to capture the ecosystem of a particular place.

In the white space of the Mala Gallery, which is artificial in itself, there is a situation of internal contradiction between natural and unnatural. But at the same time, the meeting of these environments creates a space for stopping, leisurely contemplation, concentration, disclosure of implicit processes of object creation and makes possible a concentrated representation of different views on (non) human.

Teta Tsybulnyk was born in 1987, in Kyiv. She studied sociology at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and social anthropology at the Central European University (Budapest). She worked as a program coordinator of the Film and Urban Festival “86”.
Elias Parvulesko was born in 1985. He studied engineering, modern art and film studies. He worked as a journalist, editor and film researcher. He has participated in international film festivals and collective art projects. Nominated for the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2020.
Since 2017, have been collaborating as part of the ruїns collective art and film association.

Curator: Natasha Chichasova
The exhibition will run until September 20
10, Lavrska street, Kyiv. Mala Gallery of Mystetskyi Arsenal
Working hours: 12 – 8 p.m., Tuesday – Sunday
Free entrance

On March 4, the exhibition (Re) contexts. Fragments opened in the space of the Laboratory of Contemporary Art — Mala Gallery. Within only a week a quarantine suspended work of the exhibition. During the quarantine, Mala Gallery accepted the challenge of switching into the online mode — participants of the exhibition wrote about their works on the Facebook page of the Mala Gallery. 

On July 3, the Laboratory of Contemporary Art — Mala Gallery — opens the exhibition (Re) contexts. Fragments for the second time. The exhibition will run until August 30.

Project (Re) contexts. Fragments continues the (Re) contexts. Stories programme, initiated by the Laboratory in the summer of 2019. The programme invited participants to work on ways and approaches to the storytelling of personal and collective history, using a variety of artistic mediums and instruments. As part of the programme, two exhibitions were planned to showcase the completed projects of programme participants. 

The first exhibition was titled after the pogramme — (Re) contexts. Stories — gathering in one space the works based on different personal stories and local contexts. It took place at Mala Gallery in October of 2019. The second exhibition is called (Re) contexts. Fragments and focuses on the works that somehow capture the fragments of the past, everyday life, that are gradually eroding and disappearing from our memory. In this way, the authors emphasize the temporal fluidity and fragility of things that at first glance seem unchanged and firmly rooted in the surrounding landscape. 

The subject of disappearing objects in public space is referred by the artist Kseniia Bilyk. In her artistic practice, she combines an architectural experience with an interest in neglected bulding structures. Her project Ruins is a visual study of the urban landscape, in which she distinguishes its most characterizing symbolic patterns, corresponding to the three content blocks — home, work, the church. Using the tapestry as a medium, the artist creates a situation in which some materials are contrasted with other, more reliable materials (stone, wood, metal). In this way, the artist emphasizes the fragility of architectural objects in the urban space. 

Ruins, 2018, Kseniia Bilyk. Photo: Oleksandr Popenko © Mystetskyi Arsenal 

Daniil Shumikhin builds his work on the ironic juxtaposition of the past and the present. As a basis, the artist uses the image of Kherson in the 1980s, showing it as a true “Dream City”. The banner “We want to live like in Kherson”, which according to the author people of other USSR cities used to bring on the streets, reflects this idea. In his project, the artist raises the question: “Does Kherson remain as attractive for living as before?” Using the aesthetics of Soviet postcards, Shumikhin marks them with modern places of Kherson, pointing to their condition and loss of attractiveness. 

We Want to Live Like in Kherson, 2020, Daniil Shumahin.
Photo: Oleksandr Popenko © Mystetskyi Arsenal

The problem of comprehending the history of everyday life is addressed in work by Starko / Martynchuk group. The artists analyze it using the example of diminishing public catering places and their disappearance from urban space. In its aesthetics, the work is similar to a museified archive, with the main objects — authentic places of public dining (i.e. café, eateries, or canteens) and drinking. As a result of gentrification, well-known burger places (cheap places to “drink out”), mini-bar, or cafe undergo a systematic “upgrading”, which eventually leads to their disappearance. The art group creates a space that allows viewers to look at this phenomenon comprehensively, without nostalgia, and to think of what these places became and what are their potential perspectives.

Unknown pleasures, 2018, Starko / Martynchuk group.
Photo: Oleksandr Popenko © Mystetskyi Arsenal

Olena Zagrebina refers to the observation and fixation of reality in her work. Zagrebina’s photography series Careful, landslipe! tells about the shattering of the shore that happened in the village of Lebedivka, Odessa region. In her photographs, the artist documents how space, which has acquired the status of dangerous, continues to be used by locals and how it becomes a part of their everyday leisure practices. In the project, Zagrebina raises the question of where is the boundary between danger and one’s own responsibility. 

Careful, landslip!, 2018-2019, Olena Zagrebina.
Photo: Oleksandr Popenko © Mystetskyi Arsenal

Julia Elias addresses the issues of the policy of memory and national identity in her work. The artist creates an animated image in which she reappropiates the footage from the tape Enthusiasm: The Symphony of Donbass (1931) by Dziga Vertov. Her work is a reaction to the use of the poster to the Vertov’s movie by Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam to advertise an exhibition on the history of Russian cinema. Thus, Elias emphasizes the lack of consideration of the identity of artworks and their authors by museum institutions. 

DZIGA, 2019, Julia Elias. Photo: Oleksandr Popenko © Mystetskyi Arsenal

Academia, the work of a painter Alla Sorochan, illuminates the ambiguity of the history of the place through the personal experience. The installation combines video and audio interviews of various people affiliated with the Academy (National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, Kyiv), and the attributes that are characteristic to the Academy, such as podiums for live models (for figure drawing), the fabric, or gypsum statue heads. The artist’s archive contains stories from different people, such as electrician and the faculty, who share important, fun, and horrifying episodes of their lives that are related to the Academy. Blending together gif-animations of interviews with the interior of an art studio, Sorochan lays one on another two realities that seem to coexist at the Academy, thus pointing to the ambiguity of the situation within the academic system. 

Academia, 2017, Alla Sorochan.
Photo: Oleksandr Popenko © Mystetskyi Arsenal 

Another method of working with the reality was used in the project of the artistic and curatorial collaboration of Bogdan Moroz and Yurii Polishchuk. The work bases on a video record of the artist Bohdan Moroz who is repeating the actions of cafe and store employees, residents of Venice during the flood. At that time, Moroz was visiting the city as a performer of the Ukrainian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. When posted online, the video went viral and the exclusive rights to it were acquired by the ViralHog company, still paying the artist’s interest from sales. In this way, the work reveals the artist—market relationship and the new criteria of success.

ViralHog, 2019, Bohdan Moroz / Yurii Polischuk artistic and curatorial collaboration.
Photo: Oleksandr Popenko © Mystetskyi Arsenal 

Pavel Suslyakov and Tereza Yakovyna demonstrate their own method of exploring and documenting the urban landscape. The Avanturyzm project offers a methodology for studying a place through atypical, closed spaces at first glance, as well as exploring the place through the experiences of local residents. At the exhibition, the project comprises a dialogue between the authors, who are constantly changing the exposition by adding new objects, own reflections, and observations in the form of text. 

The Avanturyzm. Conversation About Authenticity, 2020, Pavel Suslyakov / Tereza Yakovyna.
Photo: Oleksandr Popenko © Mystetskyi Arsenal  

Exhibition participants: Kseniia Bilyk, Julia Elias, Olena Zagrebina, Alla Sorochan, Daniil Shumikhin, Starko / Martynchuk group, Bogdan Moroz / Yurii Polishchuk artistic and curatorial collaboration, Tereza Yakovyna / Pavel Suslyakov. 

Consultants: Oleksandr Liapin, Ksenia Malykh, Oleksandr Soloviov, Solomia Savchuk. 

Photographs from the exhibition opening on 4th of March.

Wilderness / Nazar Furyk is an exhibition of  Contemporary Art Laboratory of Mystetskyi Arsenal.

The exhibition represents the artist’s five-year body of work and combines projects that are different, almost opposite, in their concept and methods of work. In his current photographic practice, Nazar Furyk refers to nature and the thing that surround him. He captures, or more often, arranges everyday still lives and landscapes, combines artificial objects and the natural environment, cultivates a deliberate precise chaos of things. Nazar Furyk’s works are the embodied need for photographic action, aesthetic exercises with an error wittingly embedded in them.
Not manipulating the image, he designs the very «reality» which he then captures, questioning the indexical function of the medium and emphasizing the surrealistic nature of the photographic image.

Curator: Max Gorbatskyi
The exhibition will run until November 10
10, Lavrska street, Kyiv. Mala Gallery of Mystetskyi Arsenal 
Working hours: 12 – 8 p.m., Tuesday – Sunday
Free entrance

Within the context of the (Re)contexts. Stories program, Mala Gallery Contemporary Art Lab  invited artists selected through the open call to bring up observations of everyday, collective and personal stories into artistic projects.

The sterile gallery space features works that overwhelms personal stories and local contexts and are brought to the public space – whether watching people in a drunken state at Darnytsa (Yulia Kisil), or collecting material from social networks that capture Independence Day in Ukraine. Private stories appear in the form of experiencing socialization through meal in the office team (Vitaliy Yankovy), feeling of distance and psychological stress at school (Misha Buksha), or observing anarchic changes in the urban space of postsoviet cities (Maria Pavlenko; Alexandra Kovaleva).

The exhibition is the result of the first part of the program, the second part and the final exhibition will be held in the early 2020.

Participants: Misha Buksha, Yuliya Kisil, Oleksandra Kovaleva, Kateryna Lesiv, Victoria Mironyuk, Anastasia Krasnozhon, Halyna Lavrinets, Konstantin Solodukhin, Yuri Yudin, Teresa Yakovina, Maria Pavlenko, Yaryna Saylenko, Olga Saenko, Olga Saenko, Olga Salo, Vitaly Yankovy.

The exhibition will run until October 20th
10, Lavrska street, Kyiv. Laboratory of Contemporary Art of Mystetskyi Arsenal Mala Gallery
Working hours:
12:00-20:00, Tuesday – Sunday
Free admission

In the Malla Gallery space, the research-based collective METASITU is attempting to imagine what a degrowth institution in a post-industrial city might be. The Degrowth Institute project began in 2015 with the video installation #mariupolwillnotdie #itistheworldthatwillend in Mariupol, while at the exhibition at Mala Gallery of Mystetskyi Arsenal, the project gets the outline of a total installation.

The Degrowth Institute is an initiative that was started in 2015 by METASITU, with aim to establish emancipatory narratives in (post)industrial cities whose populations have been steadily decreasing in recent years, particularly in the Donbas region. Their mission is to challenge the notion that suggests that growth—population in particular—is necessary when determining the success of a human settlement. Yet masterplanners, urbanists, and developers continue to strategize to reverse the dynamics of shrinkage, caught up in a capitalist rhetoric of growth and accelerationism.

In order to challenge this framework, and set the future into a different vector, the Degrowth Institute establish bottom-up, transversal, and horizontal approaches to master-planning in these territories.  They base their work on researching, working with and in, shrinking cities. Avoiding to suggest specific strategies, they rather create a collective momentum to address challenges such as how to work with industrial heritage, housing vacancy, or the shifting job markets, among others.

The Degrowth Institute want to bring about structural change in the way people perceive their cities. They want to create discourse, engagement, and research around the notion of degrowth in the context of Urban Planning by a) conceptualizing and organizing frameworks of knowledge exchange, b) producing artistic research-based content in a variety of formats—publications, films, objects, events, and archives—about degrowth, and collective masterplanning; and c)  encouraging emancipatory spatial practices, in order to create new narratives for possible urban futures.

The Degrowth Institute aspire to result in a transformative experience for individual participants in the project, as well as trigger new forms of working together at a local level and, eventually, collective proposals for new guidelines, approaches to resisting existing policy, and actions against particular (imposed) strategies regarding the assessment and management of heritage. And ultimately in understanding the surrounding landscapes more intimately, and reconstituting the personal relationships to the inhabited territories.

METASITU is a research-based art practice founded by Liva Dudareva and Eduardo Cassina. METASITU is abusing urbanism discourses and developing new tools to empower individuals in the way they relate to the territory. Through the curation of urbanism festivals, directing educational programs, enabling real estate transgressions, proposing workshops, performing lectures and disseminating videos, METASITU opens up new discursive lines for a queerer tomorrow.

The exhibition will run till June 2nd.
Working hours:
12:00-20:00, Tuesday – Sunday
Free admission

Often spontaneous and unconscious, serious and sometimes provocative, but the visually appealing informal artistic scene of Uzhhorod has not yet been explored or described by the history of art.
The art group Poptrans was created in 1996 as a resistance to a conservative artistic cell. The participants of the group wanted an independent statement, and therefore in their practice they reconsidered the issues of freedom of creativity and mass culture. Poptrans’s works combine the aesthetics of pop art, the conceptual approach and the ironic reflection of the everyday life of the post-Soviet context of Transcarpathia.
The project will present the collective and individual practices of the main participants of the art group – painting, texts, samizdaty, video documentation of exhibitions and performances, as well as photographs from the archives of artists.

Participants and participants: Vadim Kharabaruk, Robert Saller, Pavel Kovach Senior, Natasha Shevchenko, Andriy Stegura, Marsel Onisko and other temporary participants.
Within the framework of the project it is planned to prepare a printed edition on informal art of Uzhgorod.

The exhibition will last until May 5.