Exhibition  „Transformation. The History of Ukraine in Video Art of the 1990s-2000s“ at the Skulpturenmuseum in Marl aims to provide the German audience with an understanding of the political, social, and economic conditions of the complex transitional decade of changes in Ukraine.

This is a time of destruction and transformation and new possibilities, freedom  and confusion, a restructuring of societal consciousness, and a search for individual identity. From the West to the East, from the South to the North of Ukraine, the perspectives, goals, and values of people were being redefined, which, of course, found reflection in art and its significant internal regional differences.

Artists faced the challenging task of quickly familiarizing themselves with Western artistic traditions while simultaneously restoring their own individuality, lost during the years of Soviet dictatorship. Young artists from postmodernist and neo-modernist movements emerged on the art scene, turning to the archives of entire artistic currents that had been repressed since the 1930s, particularly the Ukrainian avant-garde and "Boichukism."

Artists reinterpreted the semi-forgotten national, religious, and ethnic myths, transformed during the Soviet period, modernizing the ideas of previous generations. The art of the New Wave offered its own reading of the contemporary reality, synthesizing, on one hand, an attention to the everyday, earthly, and bodily, and on the other, a detachment from reality and a turn toward the unattainable, the divine, the archaic.

Thus, in the videos you will see, there are many domestic elements of everyday life, but also much cosmogony and almost ritual scenes, with the presence of the author in the work often distanced by irony towards what is depicted.

“The art of that time was characterized by personalism, irrationalism, anti-Soviet sentiment, social criticism, and a combination of modernism with traditionalism. The creativity of the artists of the ‘New Wave’ movement is marked by expression, metaphorically, absurdism, and the use of mythological imagery and national authenticity. Visual art was enriched by installations, performances, media art. The crossing of boundaries between genres and types of art became the norm” (Hlib Visheslavskiy. “Contemporary Art of Ukraine. From Underground to the Mainstream” 2020).

The visual language of Ukrainian video art from that time consists of sentences—montage fragments that contain filmed images of well-known objects as well as those that evoke a certain range of associations. Such items emerge as ready-made symbols, metaphors.

Undoubtedly, there were undeniable parallels between Ukraine and the Western postmodernist tradition. Similar phenomena occurred a decade earlier in Europe and America, as well as in the USSR's satellites—Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Romania—where informational isolation was weaker. There, one observes a rejection of the aesthetics of socialist realism, cultural exchange, and dialogue with the West, experiments in the aesthetics and poetics of works, and the influence of postmodernist ideas.

German Neue Wilde in the late 1970s asserted expression, intuitivism, and volitional authorial intervention in the viewer's consciousness. Paid increased attention to the issues of national consciousness and mythology. French Figuration Llibre 1980s, brought together artists inspired by primitivism, neo-expressionism, kitsch, and images from popular urban culture. The Italian transavanguardists movement initiated and named by Achille Bonito Oliva, proposed "reactivation" of artistic styles from the past, with their personal, often ironically distanced reinterpretation..

Postmodernism in the USSR had its own characteristics. Artists, like their Western colleagues, sought to use elements of mass culture, to embrace disorder, randomness, polysemy, ironic detachment, eclecticism, and to pay heightened attention to the context in which the work exists.

The exhibition Transformation. The History of Ukraine in Video Art of the 1990s-2000s consists of several conceptually typological blocks, formal lines, and nodes dedicated to social and anthropological changes, psychological impressions, media reflections, political critique, and more. The themes are realized in the form of video clips, video archives, or even media installations.

Video art, as a part of media art in general, did not occur separately from other media of arts in Ukraine; on the contrary, artists tended to mix various practices, developing their multimedia approach. Postmodern traditions are inseparably found in all media, forms, and genres of art and culture.

The museum curators conducted research on the media art scene in Ukraine, reviewing a large number of video works and focusing on those most relevant to the time and context, leaving those that accurately describe and present the socio-cultural changes of that period, using a universal language understood at the international level.

They also considered the quality of the files, as during that time in Ukraine, a significant portion of conceptual solutions depended on technical capabilities, given that the first cameras appeared in Kyiv, Lviv, or Odesa in the late 1980s, and the first laboratory where artists could process recorded materials emerged with the establishment of the Soros Center. However, we also showcase the works of pioneers who became legends of their time, daring to venture into the world of new technologies.

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Skulpturenmuseum in Marl

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Georg Elben (curator)

Kateryna Ray (curator)

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Artists:

Max Afanasyev (TOTEM) - born 1971 in Kherson, Ukraine - lives in Kherson, Ukraine

‍Andrij Bojarov - born 1961 in Lviv, Ukraine - lives in Lviv, Ukraine

‍Oksana Chepelyk  - born 1961 in Kyiv, Ukraine - lives in Marseille, France

‍Oleksii Degtyar (nickname Maket) - born 1966 in Saratov, USSR - lives in Kyiv, Ukraine

‍Victor Dovhalyuk (AKUVIDO) - born 1967 in Mlyniv, Rivne region - lives in Berlin, Germany

‍Natalia Filonenko - born 1960 in Kyiv, Ukraine - lives in Vancouver, Canada

‍Anatoliy Gankevich - born 1965 in Odesa, Ukraine - lives in Belgium

‍Oleksandr Hnylytskyi - born 1961 in Kharkiv, Ukraine - died 2009 in Kyiv, Ukraine

‍Illya Isupov - born 1971 in Vasylkiv, Kyiv Region, Ukraine - lives in Kyiv, Ukraine

‍Gleb Katchuk - born 1973 in Kyiv, Ukraine - lives in Tbilisi, Georgia

‍Olga Kashimbeckova - born 1968 in Odesa, Ukraine  - lives in Odesa, Ukraine

‍Oleg Kharchenko - born 1963 in Sumy, Ukraine - lives in Kyiv, Ukraine

‍Ute Kilter - born 1957 in Odesa, Ukraine - lives in Odesa, Ukraine

Hanna Kuts (AKUVIDO) - born 1971 in Lviv, Ukraine - died 2006

‍Alfred Maksimenko - born 1951 in Lviv, Ukraine - lives in Lviv, Ukraine

‍Maxim Mamsikov - born 1968 in Kyiv, Ukraine - lives in Kyiv, Ukraine

‍Ihor Podolchak - born 1962 in Lviv, Ukraine - lives Lviv, Ukraine and Lodz, Poland

‍Kiril Protsenko - born 1967 in Kyiv, Ukraine - died 2017 in Kyiv, Ukraine

‍Oleksandr Roitburd- born 1961 in Odesa, Ukraine - died 2021 in Odesa, Ukraine

‍Arsen Savadov -  born 1962 in Kyiv, Ukraine - lives in NY, USA

‍Georgii Senchenko - born 1962 in Kyiv, Ukraine - lives in Berlin, Germany

‍Ivan Tsupka - born 1973 in Odesa, Ukraine - lives in Kyiv, Ukraine

‍Lesja Zajac - born 1965 in Munich, Germany - lives in Munich, Germany

‍Mykola Zhuravel - born 1960 in Kyiv, Ukraine - lives in Kyiv, Ukraine

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Social.Political.Changes

Sacral. Religion. Kitsch

Dark Rooms. Private Games

Experimental moving images

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