Anna Potiomkina
(1996) was born in Mykolaiv, studied art history and theory at the Lviv Academy of Arts and the Poznan University of Arts, lives and works in Ivano-Frankivsk. As an artist she works with video, body and performative practices, and text. She participated in the Gosti series of music and art events as a video artist in 2020. In 2023, she was part of the Sparks in the Dark residency in Timisoara, where she realized the performance How Not to Turn an Eclipse into an Eclipse together with Masha Leonenko. Later, she participated in the Bluebeard residency and performance organized by Memory Lab, where she created a video-poetry work. It was called "Want to know a secret" and was a detective investigation superimposed on reflections on growing up. The next staff member in the Asortymentna kimnata Anna is interested in the issues of collective and personal memory that is located and remains in the body, the relationship between the body and the landscape, as well as the phenomenon of the periphery with its socio-cultural manifestations.
Dancing at the Dead
2023,
video
This archive began in January 2023 with Koliada (caroling during Christmas), dedicated to the memory of Yura Stetsyk, an artist and friend who died in the war in December 2022. Yura died, but the carnival did not stop. On the contrary, the dancing went on with even more vigor. After Koliada, I thought: “What is this dance we are dancing?” In Hutsul funeral rituals until the early twentieth century, “celebrations at the dead” were widespread. They involved games and amusements happening in the first two days in the house around the deceased, where people gathered for the so-called “posyzhenie” (sitting). This ceremony aimed to ensure the correct transition from the state of the “living” to the “dead” and was performed mainly by young people. To express the symbolism of the transition during the ritual, people resorted to actions that were the antithesis of “ordinary” life and violated the norms of “profane” life. These rituals reproduced cosmogonic events and normalized them in ordinary life, legalizing them and making them real. Since Koliada, I have continued to collect an archive of different dances performed by my Ukrainian friends and acquaintances: solo and collective, individual and common, melancholic and hysterical, abroad and in Ukraine. I watch our movements and bodies change and ask myself: “What is this dance we are dancing?”
Asortymentna kimnata
October 7–October 30
On The Periphery Of War
Curated by Alona Karavai, Roman Khimei, Yarema Malashchuk, Anton Usanov
