Curatorial project «The Method» by Open Archive of Ukrainian Media art opens in Kyiv

Open Archive of Ukrainian Media art has researched the origins of new media art duo akuvido and how they had been influenced by the unique pedagogical method of artist and tutor Alfred Maksymenko.

Curatorial project «The Method» by Open Archive of Ukrainian Media art opens in Kyiv


Shot from the video «Prism 6+1» by Alfred Maksymenko, Hanna Kuts, Victor Dovhalyuk and Kateryna Kit

 

The documental exhibition «The Method» by the curatorial group of Open Archive of Ukrainian Media Art (OAUMA) is opening on the 1st of March in Kyiv in the Master Klass House (vul. Bohdana Khmelnutskoho, 57). It if the third project, prepared in terms of the The Curatorial Laboratory that is the common cooperation of four independent groups of curators and is initiated by Lizaveta Herman and Mariia Lan’ko.

 

The collection of OAUMA includes net.art created in the 2000s in Berlin and Rotterdam by Ukrainian group of artists called akuvido (Hanna Kuts and Victor Dovhalyuk). The complexity of its archiving is related to the complexity of its material representation. Moreover, the website http://www.akuvido.de/ featuring the artists’ works can disappear at any time without support: the creative engine of the group, Hanna Kuts has been dead for 10 years, and Victor Dovhalyuk lives in Berlin and hardly comes into contact. The video works created by the group “Taran” (such was the title of the group featuring Kuts and Dovhalyuk in the period of their creativity in Lviv) in the 1990s are equally difficult to archive. They were digitized by the Centre for Urban History of East Central Europe according to the VHS tapes of the Lviv artist and actual co-author of the video group “Taran”, Alfred Maksymenko. The project in the genre of generative art “360 B’U” (1998) was given to OAUMA by a co-curator of Info Media Bank (programmes for media artists in Kyiv Soros Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in the late 1990s – early 2000s) Natalia Manzhali, who was engaged in creating this work.

 

The curators comment on the exhibition progress, “Having not too many initial data available, we started our curatorial research, which sometimes resembled a detective story. During the working meeting of the Curatorial Laboratory, Yurii Kruchak told about his student days at Kharkiv Art School, where he met Hanna Kuts in 1989. Appealing for more information about akuvido to Alfred Maksymenko, whose studio was attended by Hanna Kuts when she studied at Lviv National Academy of Arts in the early 1990s, we’ve realized that the group “Taran” is not only Kuts and Dovhalyuk, but the master of Hanna – Maksymenko too”.

 

Fragment of akuvido's work "City Interactive"


The actual permit for storage and demonstration of akuvido was not obtained by OAUMA. The exhibition entitled “The Gallery at DIM MK” is the result of research of their early works and Maksymenko’s teaching methods, which influenced akuvido and some other media artists of Lviv. Moreover, this is an attempt to talk about the creative formation of the group, which once successfully entered the European context of media art development, but is little known today. Following the project of Data Chigolashvili and Nina Palavandishvili, which has been displayed at the gallery-laboratory since mid-January, “The Method” raises the question of complexity of archiving a certain art, often intangible objects, as well as archiving artifacts of the 1990s, which seem still too close diachronically to investigate and keep them in a museum.

 

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The curatorial collective of the Open Archive of Ukrainian Media Art (Ianina Prudenko, Anton Lapov and Yulia Kuznietsova) are engaged in the research and support of Ukrainian media art. Their attention is focused on both the historiographical problems of Ukrainian media archeology and archiving contemporary works of Ukrainian media art, which is investigated on a regional basis and by genre (visual, auditory, and audiovisual ones). Currently the group together with its foreign colleagues is working on creating new digital tools of analysis and presentation of the elaborated archives.

 

The curatorial collective of OAUMA would like to thank Bohdan Shumylovych, Vera Ganzha, Anastasiia Nechyporenko, Larion Lozovyi, Lisa Korniichuk, and Liubov Dyvak for their help in preparing the project.

 

1st March – 23rd March 2017

Opening: 1st March 2017 (7.00 p.m.)


The Gallery at DIM MK

57B Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi Street (the 5th floor)

 

Facebook event

 

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The Gallery at DIM MK is the exhibition space on the 5th floor of the new DIM MK on 57B Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi Street, as well as a discussion featuring the artists, curators, and researchers who are engaged in sharing, uniting, and comparing their own methods, topical interests, and views on teamwork as itself. The curatorial laboratory male and female participants open their exhibitions-statements in turns every month, which will complement and substitute each other gradually. Each exhibition is both a manifestation of the curators’ independent work and attempt to understand and complement previous works of other participants, namely curatorial statements, which are already represented in the gallery space.

 

Page of the Gallery on Instagram

 

The Curatorial Laboratory members:


Tiberiy Silvashi and Kostiantyn Rudeshko;

Ianina Prudenko, Anton Lapov, and Yulia Kuznietsova (Open Archive of Ukrainian Media Art);

Yulia Kosterieva and Yuriy Kruchak (Open Place);

Mariia Lan’ko and Lizaveta Herman (openarchive.com.ua).

 

Previous projects presented for the Curatorial Laboratory are the exhibitions "22 Statements of Inaccurate Values" by Stanislav Turina (curated by Mariia Lan’ko and Lizaveta Herman) and "Food for the Museum" by the artists Nini Palavandishviliand Data Chigolashvili (curated by Yulia Kosterieva and Yuriy Kruchak).

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