Exhibition programme of IZOLYATSIA for 2016-2017 in Kyiv

For last twenty months, IZOLYATSIA, exiled from Donetsk, has been presenting exhibitions and programmes at its new centre in Kyiv, as well as throughout Ukraine and Europe, reflecting on the impact of political turmoil in Ukraine, and worldwide, to process, reflect, and communicate with the world as only artists can; as well as engaging visionary artists, creators, and curators that look to the future with vision and hope. In pursuit of this line and following its mission — to inspire positive change in Ukraine by using culture as a tool — IZOLYATSIA keeps on encouraging socially active artists and curators and now is pleased to present the foundation’s exhibition programme for 2016 and partly for 2017 to take place in Kyiv.

Meanwhile, the international exhibition projects of IZOLYATSIA serve further reflection on today's challenges and aim to foster relations between Ukraine and international community. They include an exhibition following the open call of IZOLYATSIA and Villa Arson held among Ukrainian artists in February 2016 as part of a long-term collaboration between these celebrated institutions. The project will be on view in Villa Arson, Nice, from June 4 to August 29, 2016.

Furthermore, Culture and Conflict: IZOLYATSIA in Exile exhibition will take place at Tabačka Kulturfabrik art centre (Košice, Slovakia, 27.04 — 17.06.2016) and at WUK (Vienna, dates tbc). This travelling exhibition has already been on view at Palais de Tokyo (Paris), DOX (Czech Republic) and at the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin. The programme explores the subject of conflict in Eastern Ukraine and the position of culture under war conditions.

The programme of exhibitions in Mariupol is on the way and will be announced soon.

Exhibition Reconstruction of Memory
February 4 ⟶ March 4, 2016

Russian occupation of Crimea and military invasion into Eastern Ukraine forced half a million people to abandon their homes. They were not only forced out of their homes, they were thrown out of continuity of their personal histories. While packing documents and money in a hurry, they have left scattered grandmother’s photo albums, mother’s bijouterie, and their first toys, all those trinkets no one would rescue, but that used to mark their progress in time. The forced migrants have thus deprived themselves of material memories. The scale of this trauma is yet to be estimated.
Each participant of the project tells about loss experience in the first person as someone personally involved in a traumatic incident, using all the available artistic media to analyse the possibility of reconstructing their own memorabilia.

Curators: Lia Dostlieva, Andrii Dostliev.

Participants: Olena Bulygina, Viktor Corwic, Andrii Dostliev, Lia Dostlieva, Marina Frolova, Krolikowski Art, Maria Kulikovska, Yulia Polunina-But, Katerina Yermolaeva, Sergei Zakharov, Emine Ziyatdinova.

International poster campaign Sonia Delaunay 130
February 25 ⟶ March 13

November 14, 2015 marked the 130^th anniversary of Sonia Delaunay, world famous Art Deco artist who was born and spent her childhood in Ukraine. Sonia Delaunay often admitted that her love for bright colours was rooted in the memories of childhood, especially the images of traditional Ukrainian weddings.
The poster campaign celebrates the artist’s anniversary and her contribution to the world art and design. Designers from around the globe were invited to create their own homage to Delaunay. The best posters will be exhibited at IZOLYATSIA.

Exhibition ZBOR. Belarusian art movement
March 31 ⟶ May 6

The exhibition is a cross section of the artistic experience of the contemporary Belarusian art from the 1980s until today in form of 40 selected artworks, accompanied by brief descriptions and reproductions. All the works selected for the exhibition are among the key statements that have marked, this way or another, the development of various streams of the contemporary Belarusian art. The project curators and the invited experts have structured the artworks to fully demonstrate the strategies of several generations of artists, as well as to keep records of the cultural and political events in Belarus.

Curators: Andrei Dureika, Maxim Tyminko.

Participants: Siarhiej Babareka, Israel Basov, Belarusian Climate group, Bergamot group, Vladimir Tsesler / Sergey Voichenko, Anna Chkolnikova, Zhanna Gladko, Janna Grak, Oxana Gourinovitch, Mikhail Gulin, Lena Davidovich, Evelina Domnich / Dmitry Gelfand, Andrei Dureika, Sergey Kiryuschenko, Artur Klinov, Alexander Komarov, Alexej Koschkarow, Andrei Liankevich, Lipovy Cvet group, Alexey Lunev, Vika Mitrichenko, Galina Moskaleva / Vladimir Shakhlevich, Marina Naprushkina, Ales Pushkin, group Revision, Vitaly Rozhkov (Bismark), Ludmila Rusova, Igor Savchenko, Olga Sazykina, Sergey Shabohin, Antonina Slobodchikova, Anna Sokolova, Tamara Sokolova, Leon Tarasewicz, Oleg Tcherny, Igor Tishin, Maxim Tyminko / Gleb Choutov / Maja Ilic, Vasiliy Vasiliev, Alexey Velikjanin, Oleg Yushko / Kirill Lubenec.

Exhibition The Presence of Absence, or the Catastrophe Theory
May ⟶ June 2016

Artists Leonard Qylafi, Petros Efstathiadis, and Ali Kazma come from Albania, Greece, and Turkey, modern states formerly united by the Ottoman Empire that have since taken vastly different directions. Straddling the diverse territories of Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East, these countries reflect the enduring threads and ruptures that transcend the artificial constructs of political entities—a reality exemplified by the current situation in Ukraine.

The alchemy of place is a potent mixture of history and conquest, cultural memory and mythology, politics and national identity, landscape and geography, with the narratives of victors inscribed onto any topography in the form of physical and ephemeral remains. Foreign elements enter a territory and stay for a time, leaving a residue that becomes an integral part of its culture, the origins of this or that subject to collective amnesia and finally indistinct. Absence is also present in the people torn from their homes, as evoked by Mahmoud Darwish’s poetic meditation In the Presence of Absence.

The tragic trajectory of the Syrian refugee crisis, an exodus that will alter the future demographics of many nations while geopolitical forces continue to devastate the Middle East, is merely the latest in a long history of mass migrations spurred by war and conflict. Its severity calls into question not only the very existence of impermeable borders and their real aims—but for a deeper understanding of the cultural commonalities, and profound differences, of the communities spanning those tenuous lines.

Displacement stirs nostalgia, and the flow of language and culture is a river that cannot be halted. Our tumultuous past is an omnipresent beast whose traces creep up through the cracks of collective unconscious, often emerging in the form of extremism. As Lara Atallah writes of Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum’s work: “Lines are dangerous: They can draw boxes, curb thoughts, and create sides that barricade people within defined categories.” These artists turn our gaze to the things that become part of our identity, the things we take with us wherever we go, and the things that return to their origins like moths to the light.

Curator: Cathryn Drake.

Participants: Leonard Qylafi, Petros Efstathiadis, Ali Kazma.

Project Social Contract
June 30 ⟶ July 31, 2016

The destruction of Lenin’s statue in Kyiv on December 8, 2013 led to the discussion on what should be put on its place – if anything should be put at all. Obviously, commemorative objects have been constructed for centuries in public spaces designed to remind society and future generations of past narratives. However, nowadays the memory function has successfully been conveyed to Google, and the nature of memory has dramatically changed. Historically in Ukraine commemorative objects were used to cultivate or manipulate our memories, and this potential of any sculpture or monument that comes to occupy the vacant place remains very high and could be used by different political parties. But in post-Euromaidan Ukraine it has finally become possible to launch public discussion and listen to the opinion of citizens instead of wordlessly accepting government decision upon the matter.
The project seeks to broach numerous approaches to the construction and function of commemorative objects; start a broad discussion within the society and try to generate mutual consent on the choice for this site. International artists will create temporary sculpture installations on the place of the former Lenin’s statue, and will carry out a series of performances and participatory actions, problematising current relationships between social need, artistic approach and ideology.

Curator: Kateryna Fulyuk.

Participants (to be completed): Pilar Quinteros (CL), Luchezar Boyadjiev (BG), Pilar Mata Dupont (AU), Guy Königstein (IL), Yeesookyung (KR), Zhanna Kadyrova (UA), Krassimir Terziev (BG).

Project Blue Box
October ⟶ November 2016

Blue box, or the chroma key, is a television/motion picture technology used to erase the background so as to replace it with another one – where the protagonist were never present. As a device to create an imaginary space, blue box is the actual space itself, which consists of materials, shapes and colours, which are erased and serve to erase. This technology provides us with a concept to reflect on the three spatial planes, which constitute an artistic work. These are: the space as imagined through the artistic intervention; the space of the artistic practice: the institutional field in the relation to actual political, social, media relations; a state of the site-specific art: its ideologies and tools.

Blue Box is an international project consisting of six site-specific interventions in Belarus, Armenia, Moldova, Georgia, Poland and Ukraine, pondering over the contemporary meanings of site-specificity, especially in the post-socialist countries.

Curator of the Ukrainian part: Daniel Muzyczuk.

Exhibition People in the Great War 1914 – …
Summer ⟶ Autumn 2017

World War I, also known as the Great War, was a conflict of an unprecedented scope, which has affected all aspects of life around the world. The exhibition, based on the archives found in Lviv, Kyiv, Donetsk, Mariupol and Odessa, is designed to look at the war from two different but interconnected perspectives: on the one hand, as a global conflict, and on the other, as an individual experience of its various participants.

Thematically, the exhibition will be divided into two parts. The first part will deal with the global aspect of the war: WWI was a total industrial catastrophe that has changed the borders and political systems, catalysed the demise of empires and emergence of new national states, and fuelled radical cultural and economic change, and scientific progress.

The second part will tell personal stories, emotional and physical experiences, as well as moral challenges of those who fought on the battlefield and the home front, found themselves in the occupation zones, were held hostage or became forced migrants.