January 19, 2012, Thursday, 15:00
Feminism is traditionally thought of as an antonym for militarism, and the conduction of pride parades usually seems unthinkable next to the religious shrines, especially in countries where the church is not separated from the state. However, the Israeli experience, and this is the point of its exceptionality, demonstrates the opposite: women can make a successful political career boasting about their experience in the army, and gay parades were performed a couple hundred metres from the Old City of Jerusalem, the sacred place for the three monotheistic religions. The lecture by Alek D. Epstein will consider this unique experience and the role of gender issues in the social and political life using the example of Israel within a comparative perspective.
COLLECTED ARTICLES PRESENTATION
Ukrainian Orientalistics: Special Issue on Jewish Studies / Ed. by Vitaly Chernoivanenko. Kyiv, 2011.
We present to the academic community a collection of articles and reviews in Jewish studies by Ukrainian and foreign (USA, Canada, Israel, Germany, Sweden, Russia) scholars. The articles are dedicated to different issues and aspects of history and culture of Jewish civilization since ancient times to nowadays.
Participants: Ihor Sribnyak, editor in chief of the “Ukrainian Oriental Studies” magazine (Ukraine); Vitaly Chernoivanenko, author, editor of a special edition of “Ukrainian Oriental Studies” (Ukraine); Alek D. Epstein, author (Israel); Tayisiya Sydorchuk, author (Ukraine); Rostyslav Dymerets, author (Ukraine).
TO NOTICE THE ELEPHANT
difficulties of political translation
December 22, 2011, Thursday, 18:00
Screening of Vadim Jendrejko’s film “The Woman with the Five Elephants” (2009)
The German-speaking West has responded vividly to the film “The Woman with the Five Elephants” about the famous translator Svetlana Geier, from Kyiv by birth, who fled from Ukraine to Germany at the end of the World War II. In particular, the question of collaboration and the heroine’s attitude to Nazism has remained an open one. Talking about the texture of language, Svetlana Geier, who’s being called “the new voice of Dostoevsky”, creates her own way of speaking about the past and political views. Similarly, the texture of the film language brings to light the burning ideological issues, referring to the Dostoevsky’s heritage and the topic of nationalism.
Viktoria Ivanenko, theorist of literature, Kyiv National Linguistic University.
Kateryna Mishchenko, translator, editor of the “Prostory” magazine.
December 8 – 24, 2011, Monday – Saturday, 10.00 – 18.00
Mykola Kapusta, Serhiy Ryabokon, Oleksandr Kostenko, Love Antell, Magnus Bard, Riber Hansson, Helena Lindholm, Karin Sunvisson
Exhibition opening: December 7, Wednesday, 18:00
SPECIAL EVENTS:
December 8, Thursday, 16:00
Master-class by Magnus Bard “Draw the Changes: Political Caricature in Sweden”
December 14, Wednesday, 15:30
Seminar “Ecological Way of Life. +1”
December 17, Saturday, 15:00
Debating Club “‘Ecology of Freedom’ and the Sources of the Global Ecological Crisis”
In conjunction with the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December 2009, a group of 25 Nordic newspaper cartoonists provided some amusing and alarming reflections on climate change. To illustrate Sweden’s active involvement in climate and environment issues, the Swedish Institute has put together an exhibition “Facing the Climate – Swedish Cartoonists take a sharp and disturbing look at the Climate”.
The exhibition is part of a concerted drive by the Swedish Institute to promote sustainable development. The exhibition which is produced locally in every country where it is shown has already reached an audience of more than 40.000 visitors since September 2010, when it was first shown in Iceland. Since then it has toured to the Balkans, Malaysia, Syria, Latvia, Russia and is being shown in a number of countries around the world, including Ukraine, during 2011. Cartoonists from Ukraine were invited to give their view of the climate and their images are shown together with the Swedish cartoonists in three Ukrainian cities: Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk and Kyiv. Workshop results from the different venues make the exhibition grow all the time and go with the exhibition on tour.
Seminars, workshops and local initiatives related to sustainable development contribute to highlighting the climate issue. The aim of the project is to encourage discussion about the sustainable society and heighten awareness of current environmental problems. Every effort – local or global – is important and no effort is too small. How we live, what we eat, how we travel and what we choose to wear – this is what sustainable development is about.
Facing the Climate is a collaboration between the Swedish Institute, Embassy of Sweden in Ukraine, Foundation Center for Contemporary Art, Dnipropetrovsk Art Museum, Donetsk Cultural Workers House, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Visual Culture Research Center at NaUKMA, Library of NaUKMA.
1.12.2011, 8 PM
Forms of Engagement: Art/Knowledge/Politics
Debate with Vasyl Cherepanyn, Katarzyna Fidos, Oleksiy Radynski and Artur Zmijewski
In recent years, the debate on new forms of interaction between art, knowledge and politics has intensified. In the context of Eastern Europe, this resulted in the simultaneous emergence of several independent initiatives that aim at merging the fields of art, scientific discourse and political activism.
In the context of highly atomized and anti-solidary post-Socialist societies these fields are regarded as distinct but related forms of engagement and collective action. In Poland, Artur Zmijewski’s text Applied Social Arts manifested the need for politically engaged art in the context marked by a negative legacy of Socialist Realism. In Russia and Ukraine, activities of numerous artistic and political initiatives aim at introducing a new order into a public sphere marked by a lack of democratic procedures.
The discussion will focus on the activities of those initiatives in the context of the withering away of the democratic public sphere in both Eastern and Western Europe.
Vasyl Cherepanyn, director of the Visual Culture Research Center at NaUKMA, editor of the Ukrainian edition of the “Krytyka Polityczna” magazine.
Katarzyna Fidos, coordinator of the “Krytyka Polityczna” club in Berlin.
Oleksiy Radynski, editor of the Ukrainian edition of the “Krytyka Polityczna” magazine, activist of the Visual Culture Research Center at NaUKMA.
Artur Zmijewski, curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale.
TREMBLING BODIES video show and discussion on Polish engaged art
Stanisław Ruksza
November 29 – 30, 2011, Tuesday – Wednesday, 17:30
Movies by Paweł Althamer, Katarzyna Górna, Zbigniew Libera, Joanna Rajkowska, Artur Żmijewski
Trembling Bodies. Conversations with Artists is an anthology of Artur Żmijewski’s conversations with Polish artists related to the “critical art” movement, such as Paweł Althamer, Katarzyna Górna, Andrzej Karas, Grzegorz Klaman, Grzegorz Kowalski, Katarzyna Kozyra, Zbigniew Libera, Jacek Markiewicz, Joanna Rajkowska. These conversations, conducted between 1993 and 2004, express radical artistic positions analyzed through the lens of everyday life, and social and political transformations. This corpus of texts appears as a major document relating the evolutions of Polish art from the 1990s to the present.
Stanisław Ruksza – art historian, curator and artistic director of the Center of Contemporary Art Kronika in Bytom (www.kronika.org.pl), co-editor of “Trembling bodies” by Artur Żmijewski, member of the “Political Critique” (“Krytyka Polityczna”) team – the main Polish leftist cultural enterprise.
November 24-25, 2011, 17:00
November, 24, 2011, Thursday, 17.00
Literature reading and discussion “Another work vol. 2”
Participants: Yaroslav Gadzinskyi, Syargey Prylutski, Kateryna Babkina, Julia Stakhivska, Oleh Kocarev, Vasyl Lozynskyi (moderator).
The authors share their work experience in the humanitarian, artistic and other fields, and do some recitation. It is harder to define the line between creation and work than to differentiate manual, hired or industrial labour. Taken this into account, it is important how a piece of literature reveals social problems or how it embodies them in a performative way. After the performances there will be a discussion on how to enhance professional and economic conditions in the sphere of culture and how it correlates with creation.
Presentation of the “Video-archive of Andriy Polyakov” (video, 100 min., 2011)
Andriy Polyakov collected a big video-archive while working as a flight attendant in a small air company. The selected moments, the video-digest, are the best fragments of what one can see in air and what one wouldn’t notice without having a long-term aeronautics experience.
November, 25, 2011, Friday, 17.00
Presentation of videos
Andriy Movchan “Decoding” (video, 3 min., 2011)
A journalist’s job has around itself an unsound halo of privileged business. Meanwhile the whole process of the production of information stays behind the scenes. Is there a fundamental difference between the news factory and the rest of factories? After all, is the journalist a worker, or is he something immeasurably more? As it turns out that there is a vital difference between professional mythology and labour.
After the screening a discussion will be held with the participation of Andriy Yanitsky, Kyiv Independent Media Trade Union activist.
Vitaliy Atanasov, Anastasia Ryabchuk. “Kherson machine-building plant” (video 30 min, 2011)
The video consists of documentary materials and interviews with workers, who took part in the 2009 Kherson protests. The workers reflect on why the protests have begun and how it has taken place, and also on the solidarity of workers from other enterprises, on why the protests had failed and on the future of labour movement in Ukraine.
LGBT AND JEWISH DISCOURSE: FROM TABOO TO TOLERANCE
Vitaliy Chernoivanenko
November 22, 2011, Tuesday, 17:00
Film “Eyes Wide Open” by Haim Tabakman, 2009
November 23, 2011, Wednesday, 17:00
How has the issue of homosexuality been raised in Jewish surroundings throughout centuries, how was it depicted and interpreted in texts, how has it evolved, and how has it finally become the challenge for religion and society at the end of 20th century? How does the modern Judaism, within its different tendencies, see the LGBT-community and persons, who are involved in alternative sexual practice?
Vitaly Chernoivanenko is a researcher at Omeljan Pritsak Research Center for Oriental Studies, lecturer at the Department of History at NaUKMA, his research concerns Jewish texts, as well as queer problems in the historical and literary contexts.
17th of November – 2nd of December 2011 on weekdays from 10:00 to 18:00
The LABOUR SHOW Exhibition opens on Wednesday, the 16th of November, 17:30
Once upon a time, we worshipped at Labour’s feet. In the 20th century, she led the pantheon of artistic representation time and time again. Resplendent with the saintly soul of the underdog, images of her workers were splashed all over the newspapers, theysurfaced in the most optimistic news items, they bled through the sides of buildings, like austere ornaments.
But today, Labour – or should we say, real work –floats in front of us like an outcast from the heavens. We’ve hardly noticed that our battle with Labour’s faces has ended with a rout of herfinal images, that we’ve shoved them somewhere off stage, behind the scenes of the capitalist production line. Labour isn’t just no longer of interest to us – she simply doesn’t fit the bill. She sticks out like a sore thumb. Wherever the stage lights shine on today’s goods, to make them glow with sacred importance, she’s frankly, well – an embarrassment. Yet our rebellion against Labour’s might didn’t end with release from her oppressive, tormenting grip. Instead it simply left us with another massive drop in her status, which in any case was always ambivalent – we’ve crowded Labour out of our field of view.
Judging by appearances, our world today is custom-made, it’s artificial, and it can get by fine without ever having toact alongside the stuff from which it’s made, let alone the ways it’s made, or the people who make it.
The Soviet dayslie behind us: idealised milkmaids no longer smile at us from our television screens. Yet together with their disappearance, as if theyjust walked away across the land, a few other representative links have also receded from the foreground of production and the manufacturing of material goods. Labour, as she migrates to the faraway fields of the humdrum, where she works away unseen, is becoming mysterious and inscrutable, although she’s no less matter-of-fact.
Hudsoviet, the curatorial alliance, invites you to come and see a show whose name sounds a bit anachronistic – the “LABOUR SHOW”. Here you will be able to come face to face with the people who, thanks to the willpower of today’s capitalist ideologies, have become faceless and unreal, people who’ve become so fantastical, that they’ve relinquished all form of control, of exploitation, of self-exploitation.
Here, you’ll be able to see the faces behind labour, faces which are gradually and definitively migrating further from the field of the consciousness towards the unconscious, towards the field of dreams. The labours of the artist, to whom a separate thematic line of the exhibition is dedicated, shake off the fetters of the dream-world, and allow the worker to perform simultaneously in the role of labour’s muse. In today’s world, really only Art can lead Labour back into the footlights. No other visual means has what it takes.
Taking part in the exhibition are: Yevgenia Belorusets, Stephan Burger (Switzerland), Aleksandra Galkina, Nikita Kadan, Lesia Khomenko (Ukraine), YuliaKostereva, Yuri Kruchak, Vladimir Kusnetsov, Vladimir Logutov, Nikolai Matsenko, Lada Nakonechna, Lucia Nimtsova (Slovakia), Nikolai Oleynikov, R.E.P., Oleksiy Salmanov, Sergey Sapozhnikov, Oleksiy Say, MladenStilinovic (Croatia), Tanz Laboratorium, David Ter-Oganyan (Russia), Anna Zvyagintseva.
The lecture on photography “Antiplastik”
November 17th at 5 p.m.
The lecture will include presentations by Maksym Kunytsya (“FotoFond”), Olga Zakrevska (“Folga” studio) and Andriy Peliukhovsky (“New Aesthetics of Ukrainian Photography”) on the following topics:
• photo art history;
• technical features of a camera and specificity of photo film photography;
• photography myths and contemporary photo art in Ukraine;
• portrait shooting: how to work with people;
• photography in trips.
PRESENTATION OF THE “POLITICAL CRITIQUE” MAGAZINE
11.11.11, 17:30
In the issue:
GLORY TO THE ENEMIES! POLITICS OF CRISIS
SPECIFICS OF POLITICAL STRUGGLE VOLODARSKY’S DIARY BEWARE OF ART!
Participants: Vitaliy Atanasov, Yevgeniya Belorusets, Denys Gorbach, Oleksandr Ivashyna,
Oleksiy Radynsky, Vasyl Cherepanyn
3.11.11 – 11.11.11
Urban environment is the space for common use. To be good for the coexistence of its residents, this space is accordingly lain out and unified, functionally and aesthetically regulated. Such organization determines the ways it can be used, presupposes certain possibilities, as well as the range of common rules and norms of public life.
But the city is also the “living space” of each of us, transpierced by personal needs and aspirations, desires or interests. Despite its isolation by the standard facades and the bounds of the “public order”, the whole chaos of the “private” pervading the city is inevitably bursting out the assigned enclaves into the organized space of public representation, causing its unexpected mutations and distortions. The redefining of the planned-out function, the “improvement” of some fragment of the city structure according to individual needs (the ones not taken into account) or notions of suitability, aesthetic editing under the personal sense of “the beautiful” – the anonymous, but entirely concrete city dwellers transform the space unified under common needs, adapting it for the satisfaction or manifestation of their own desires.
Observing the public city space with a gaze of a voyeur, Oleksandr Burlaka and Ivan Melnychuk retrieve traces of private stories in it, and manifestations of personal intervention, saturated charge of sincerity not expected here. Such urban sensuality also appears for them to be the instrument for studying the contemporary ukrainian city. Tracking the examples of the so-called “grassroots initiatives” in the public space, the accidental or intentional public expressions of individual needs, motives, tastes and desires, they detect not only the (seductive for the voyeur) contour of the private, but also its specific social character.
The exhibition takes place within the Visual Culture Research Center at NaUKMA project Unrendered Spaces, which includes a series of expositions dedicated to the strategies of perception of environment inside and outside the city, the possibilities of its exploration using the means of art. Concentrated on the points of perceptive conflict, multiple interpretations of the living space, the project aims at playing out the political, social, aesthetic zones of tension by redefining it.