Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei
Collaborating at the edge of visual art and cinema since 2013, Kyiv-based artists and filmmakers Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk graduated as cinematographers from the Kyiv National Theatre, Cinema and Television University. They were awarded the main award of the PinchukArtCentre Prize (2020), VISIO Young Talent Acquisition Prize (2021). Their debut documentary feature New Jerusalem received the Special Mention Award at Kharkiv MeetDocs and the duo also participated at the Future Generation Art Prize 2021. Their video works are in collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Frac Bretagne, and Fondazione In Between Art Film. Khimei and Malashchukare members of the art group Prykarpattian Theater which is currently working on the project Theater of Hopes and Expectations.
Explosions Near the Museum
2023,
HD video, 14’
Looted by the Russian occupying forces between October 24 and 26, 2022, the Kherson Local History Museum used to house southern Ukraine’s largest and oldest collections of antiquities. The museum held over 173,000 objects, spanning seven millennia, from Scythian gold to World War II weaponry. Two weeks before Kherson was liberated by the Ukrainians, Russian forces enacted a strategic theft, stripping centuries of Ukrainian history from the museum/region. Explosions Near the Museum was shot inside the museum, which is less than two kilometers from Russian-occupied territory. The film directs our gaze to empty plinths or display cases and recalls the exhibits they once contained – paintings, gold, silver, ancient Greek artifacts, religious icons, as well as historical documents of shared Russian and Ukrainian history. The shelling and missile strikes audible in the background were recorded while filming on-site on December 12, 2022. Explosions Near the Museum is both a factual reflection on the Kherson Museum’s plundering and a tender statement about the importance of cultural heritage in wartime.
neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), station urbaner kulturen/nGbK Hellersdorf, Between Bridges, Prater Galerie
February 23–June 9
Kyiv Perennial
So That Nobody Would Later Say We Don’t Remember
2020,
video, 24’
A video by Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei interacts with the history and community of Myrnohrad, a city located in the steppe area southwest of the Donets Ridge. The idea of the work develops from the obelisk dedicated to miners and refers to the memory of the tragedy that occurred in 1977. About forty years ago, the Novator mine was closed due to an accident that killed the miners and rescuers who used to work there. Today, the area above the surface is overgrown with shrubbery, and the infrastructure facilities have fallen into ruins. The artists walk along the route over the excavation together with the local residents. The video documents a collective procession which starts where the workers went down to get coal and leads to the monument to the dead miners installed at the approximate location of the underground tragedy. In this way, a group of people walking on the surface through thickets, roadside plantations, residential neighborhoods, a city square, and a plowed field perform a particular act of remembrance. The very process of preparation for a performative action inextricably links to the search for precise locations and symbolic recollection.
Sorry No Rooms Available
October 8–November 12
Where Are We Now, After All Those Endlessly Repeated Words?
Curated by Petro Ryaska, Daria Shevtsova
Space Bridge
2023,
video broadcast
People who used to see each other often and spend time together have found themselves separated by thousands of kilometers. The usual meeting places, such as cafes, continue to fulfill their function even though the structure of society and shared values is changing. Despite the shifts in the ethical orientation of a militarized society, such places still play a significant role and have become a compromise option for organizing leisure time during breaks from working for victory. They have become a justifiable maximum of the acceptable. Masses of people are moving in organized (and not so organized) ways to escape, to be safe, or to self-organize for resistance. They move, mix, and detonate. Cafes become points of capturing these movements, where they freeze into certain social constellations – a momentary living picture showing “other” life. The Space Bridge takes the café to another dimension, where (dis)similar places are connected by an invisible link. The Space Bridge embodies both unity and division in the bitterness of coffee or beer, which tastes slightly different depending on the distance from the front. A camera and a screen are installed in three different cafes at different distances from the front – in Kharkiv, Frankivsk, and Berlin. They transmit and receive image signals from each other. In Kharkiv’s Protagonist, visitors will watch the life in the Berlin bar of the Ukrainian diaspora, Medusa; in Medusa, the monitor behind the bar will show visitors of Ivano-Frankivsk’s GOST bar drinking beer; and their image is broadcast in the Protagonist, closing the circle of the Space Bridge. All these places in the live broadcast signify the home front, or rather its relativity. To stay in touch against all odds. To defend the right to the rear against all odds. To move this line of defense further and further east against all odds.
Asortymentna kimnata
October 7–October 30
On The Periphery Of War
Curated by Alona Karavai, Roman Khimei, Yarema Malashchuk, Anton Usanov
commissioned by the Kyiv Biennial
Dedicated to the Youth of the World II and Dedicated to the Youth of the World III
2019/2023,
HD videos, 8:49 min, colour, sound
Dedicated to the Youth of the World III is a reenactment of the artists’ film with the same title produced in 2019, Dedicated to the Youth of the World II, which documented the rave Сxema in Kyiv. While Kyiv’s youth appeared in that latter film to reclaim their post-revolutionary city in an intimate yet massive nighttime ritual – a kind of unrestricted freedom many looked forward to – the new version was created against a completely different backdrop. The artists decided to reenact the party in September 2023 in the face of constant threat, focusing on community members who have replaced the previous rave participants, after a prolonged pandemic and the full- scale invasion by Russian occupation forces. Dedicated to the Youth of the World III aims to capture the novel reality that has since emerged, a “new day” that nobody would have imagined in their wildest dreams four years ago.
Between Bridges, daadgalerie
May 24–July 27
A Time in Pieces
Curated by Serge Klymko and Viktor Neumann
Dedicated to the Youth of the World II and Dedicated to the Youth of the World III
2019/2023,
HD videos, 8:49 min, colour, sound
Dedicated to the Youth of the World III is a reenactment of the artists’ film with the same title produced in 2019, Dedicated to the Youth of the World II, which documented the rave Сxema in Kyiv. While Kyiv’s youth appeared in that latter film to reclaim their post-revolutionary city in an intimate yet massive nighttime ritual – a kind of unrestricted freedom many looked forward to – the new version was created against a completely different backdrop. The artists decided to reenact the party in September 2023 in the face of constant threat, focusing on community members who have replaced the previous rave participants, after a prolonged pandemic and the full- scale invasion by Russian occupation forces. Dedicated to the Youth of the World III aims to capture the novel reality that has since emerged, a “new day” that nobody would have imagined in their wildest dreams four years ago.
Augarten Contemporary, hoast, IG Architektur, Laurenz, Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Never At Home, Waffen Franz Kapfer, New Jörg, Ve.Sch
October 17–December 17
Main Exhibition
Curators: Serge Klymko, Hedwig Saxenhuber and Georg Schöllhammer
