TALK AT SUPERMARKET STOCKHOLM
www.supermarketartfair.com
With Yuliya Usova (curator, Stockholm/Kyiv)
We will present a part of the work we have been carrying out since August 2006 in Ukraine and would like to introduce some of the ideas we are having for expanding the project CCCK - Center for Communication and Context in the future. CCCK was founded in August 2006, in Kyiv by Ingela and myself and we collaborated over long peridos with Volodymyr Kuznetsov, an artist and member of REP group, based in Kyiv. CCCK aims to be a platform for debate of the Ukrainian institutional landscape, while CCCK focuses specifically on the two Soros Art Centers in Ukraine, Odessa and Kyiv, which were established during the nineties.
What you have just seen is a documentation of the conference EAST-WEST, the problem of cultural incomprehension, which has been organized by the Soros Center for Contemporary Art Odessa in the nineties. We have found this documentation in the video-archives of the Center for Contemporary Art Kyiv and it has been shown in an exhibition we have held in Odessa this winter. On one hand it shows many of the let's say important players of the Odessa art scene of the 80's and 90's and some of the Ukrainian art-scene today. On the other hand this video introduces many different factors that the project CCCK - the Center for Communication and Context Kyiv is dealing with.
BEGINNING OF CCCK
When Ingela and I met in Kyiv in 2006 we realized that on one hand our own positioning as artists from the West working in Ukraine was an important question in our work and that we had to deal with that positioning and its implications. Ukraine confronts you as a foreigner with a lot of new impressions, including its recent so-called revolution, its rapid economic changes and political instability. We had the feeling that creating work though around these political topics could not contribute any but a superficial reflection on processes far too complex for us to comprehend in the short time of our stay.
It was then that we turned our attention more and more to the way we were producing and specifically to the Center hosting us, the CCA Kyiv and its own very instable institutional position. We realized that it is within the Center for Contemporary Art Kyiv, that we do encounter the complexity of economic changes in Ukraine, as much as our role partaking within what is promoted as cultural East-West exchange. The CCA Kyiv is one of the in total 20 of Soros Art Centers which were established during the nineties operating throughout Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia with a uniform institutional model, aiming to locally give our artist grants, promote local/national art in the West, establish artist documentations and create annual exhibitions. At the end of the nineties Soros funding decreased and then ceased finally, leaving many centers with the option to either close down or to re-position their program and attrackt new funders. Especially at the outskirts of Soros activity in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and Kazachstan local governmental structures were not ready to support contemporary art. At the time of our stay CCA Kyiv had shrinked from the once pre-conceived international art institution to a building without finances in which the spirit of an artist-run space had moved in. The former assistant Yuliya Vaganova assumed directorship and runs the Art Center today. We realized that also the residency we participated in, financed through the Swedish and Polish embassies - one of the last remaining resource partners - was actually one of the quiet relevant attempts of the CCA to continue its former functions.
During our first stay within very close collaboration with other participating artists we created a group exhibition which analysed its own exhibition formats, and partly dealt with the making of an exhibition. Especially Lesya Khomenko and Volodymyr Kuznetsov, both members of REP group indoctrinated us with the conditions of the Ukrainian art-context and greatly influenced the work we made there. Together we opened a project space within the exhibition which was continued later by Vova Kuznetsov and we initiated a series of work-presentations and discussions.
At the same time Ingela and I opened the Center for Context and Communication Kyiv, which in the exhibition compiled interviews on the future perspectivs and the history of the Art Center itself.
We realized that the approach and question of the CCCK was probably very much responding to the situation in Kyiv - we understood that in the rapid changes that Kyiv undergoes any platform for debate was severely lacking. Having met with many former and current staff members of the SCCA/CCA we also realized that the current discussion in Ukraine is captured within an increasing economization and professionalisation shift:
The current art-activites in Ukraine are focused around the next resource center, namely PinchukArtCenter, which is owned and sponsored by oligarch and former politican Victor Pinchuk. The curators, artists and critics who were working/educated in the sphere of the Soros Centers during the nineties have mostly not been recognized as professional in the recently blossoming sphere of commercial galleries. (Though there are two new art-newspapers starting up now, so far there have been two bloggers reporting on art and culture in Ukraine.) A Russian art-critic points out that the function of the critic in Russia is gradually suspended in favor of a text-producing manager promoter, which we think applies very much to today's trends in Ukraine. The effect this has on the current institutional landscape and artistic production in Kyiv and Ukraine, the way notions of professionalism are affected again point at the relevance to analyse the impact of art's stakeholders on the production of contemporary art:
We realized that we would like to carry on with CCCK as a sort of virtual institution, that would embody / facilitate an ongoing debate in different formats in Ukraine, discussing the art-institutional developments.
Within the frame of the project Exteriors, initiated and curated by Index Stockholm, by Helena Holmberg and Mats Stjernsted supported by the Swedish Institute and co-organized with the CCA Kyiv and Yuliya Vaganova we got the chance to carry on with CCCK. We aimed to extend our meetings with former staff members of the SCCA and to intensify the topics raised in discussions so far. We travelled to Lviv, Kyiv and Odessa, where we eventually started to focus on the short period of institutionalized contemporary art in Odessa's SCCA of the nineties.
SCCA ODESSA
The Soros Center for Contemporaray Art Odessa tells the story of a very specific local art-context of the Odessa's 60's to 80s in which soft modernism, romantic conceptualism, new wave, new wild and trans-avantgarde. develop and undermine the official state-promoted art. By the early nineties many self-organized art-projects take place in Odessa, produced with very low or no budget and several art-organizations establish from a very active art-scene whose members later merge for the greatest part into the Moscow art-market (Leiderman, Hermeneutics Group). In 1996 the later director Mihailo Rachkovetsky and artistic leader Alexander Roitburd meet with people from the Soros foundation and establish a Soros Center for Contemporary Arts in Odessa. A non-capital SCCA was excepctional in the general Soros funding policy and the SCCA dealt with a relatively small budget in comparison to the SCCA Kyiv. Though SCCA Odessa focused initially very much on the local Odessa art context, eventually when an alternative proposal was accepted by the Soros board, a new director, Andrey Taranenko, takes over the lead of the institution. The non-approved plan (Rachkovetsky) suggests to establish a local exhibition space, which has never been realized. Documentation from this first SCCA period is hard to be found. The new curatorial team takes off to promote Ukrainian Art - Young british artist style: They encourage artists to use video and new media, for which the equipment is not easy to get in Odessa at that time and the role of the curator who supplies the work with western-oriented exhibition-concepts is rising.
In the 2000 Soros funding ceases. Most Odessa artists leave for Moscow, Kyiv or other countries, most former SCCA employees work in journalism or advertisement today. The first director Mihailo Rachkovetsky established and leads the Odessa Jewish Museum today, Andrij Taranenko is the editor in chief of Plaboy magazine, Ukraine. In Odessa today is no contemporary art exhibition space, far from speaking of an artist run space or a contemporary art audience. In allusion to the un-realized proposal of the local exhibition space, it was important for us to open an exhibition in Odessa and we managed to establish a partnership with the Union of Artists of Ukraine and to exhibit the exhibition A Short Institutional Affair in Odessa in the Arists Union exhibition salon.
A SHORT INSTITUTIONAL AFFAIR
In what we called "A Short institutional affair" we brought works together by Ukrainian artists, which dealt with re-narrating history and reflecting the language of the SCCA institution itself. One of these works shown there you can see at the booth of F.A.I.T. gallery from Krakow, it is the work "Lyrnik" by artist group REP -Revolutionary Experimental Space, where a traditional Ukrainian Lira player sings the history of performance art to a public on a public square in Kyiv. We screened the work Office Games by Miroslav Kulshitzky, a video artist and curator, who during his employment at the SCCA Odessa had made a work in 1998 where he picked up sentences and pieces of conversations from the office, and rotates them pretty nineties style in black, silently over a yellow screen. We selected archived video-materials, such as EAST-WEST shown in the beginning, but also created replies to them, using the format of "Office Games" with slogans of the European Cultural Foundation today, we replicated works we had found on footage, such as sculptures and drawings. We compiled the research we have conducted in Ukraine, consisting mainly of many interviews with former SCCA staff members and employees of other art-institutions in Lviv, Kyiv and Odessa in a documentary with the same title " Ashort institutional affair", reporting on the institutional development in Ukraine since the early nineties. The former director of SCCA Odessa opened the exhibition with an opening speech. Artist group REP created a performance in which a local art-historian was guiding through the exhibition, explaining references and the art-historical background of the works shown. In the artist Union of Ukraine Odessa we held a short open discussion with local artist Igor Gusjew, artist group REP from Kiyv, local art-critic Ute Kilter and former SCCA director Mihailo Rashkovetsky. Additionally we were able to commissioned texts on the topic in Ukraine, which accompanied the exhibition.
When we speak of the CCCK as a local project then we mean that it was important for us that it works and takes place in Ukraine, which has also rendered our practices very much in comparison to what we have done before. We don't think that the fact were we Ukrainian born would automatically qualify us more to speak in front of you, of how we perceive and partake in Ukrainian art-processes, though since our observations are younger and have had less time to mature, they might be less fundamental than what Nikita Kadan could tell you. But by now we feel that CCCK has become a part of the few art-activities in Ukraine
A young painter told us one night that, studying at the Academie she knew already that the format of painting would not much longer proof the medium in which she thinks she could express her content and thought. At the same time, she said, it was difficult for her to imagine herself being a, so she said "contemporary artist". Though art group REP works integrative and focuses more and more on their curatorial, theoretical and as they say educational role within the Ukrainian art-scene rarely any other position of "contemporary Ukrainian art practices" are visible. In CCCK she saw a "third way" of what "contemporary practices" between the classical art-historic training of the academy, and REP's agitational approach.
Turning our production into investigating an institutional model which had thus been intertwined with an ideological package of Soros Open Society (assisting transitional countries to accomplish their transformation into open, western-minded democracies) including the third (voluntary, NGO) sector, has helped us to address as well the role we as cultural producers take within our internationalizing practices. We do not say that our attempts and practices do not carry within them new problems and other conflicts or propell the old ones forward, but we do perceive our practices set within an increasingly internationalized art-market in which countries as Ukraine are in the A group of the European Cultural Foundation Travel Grants Guidelines. At the same time we think that it is actually in Kyiv and Odessa that we encounter questions which proof relevant in other countries and other context, whose art-scenes were facilitated by the same Soros funding structure during the nieneties, sometimes greatly affecting the NGO sector, (as in Balkan countries) but certainly affecting the concepts of what an art-institution is or could be.
As CCCK we have decided to try to carry the project into other contexts and the contexts of other former Soros Art Centers. Currently we are planning to work in Bulgaria and Macedonia, which will consist as before of hoping to meet the current and former staff members, curators and directors and if possible develop local presentations in collaboration with them. A specific topic we would like to focus on are the SCCA video archives which have been meticulously compiled but are hardly consulted, though they document the local developments of the 90's and have often outlasted their institutions. Certainly working with those materials, including the specific use of video in the nineties, also as an expression of contemporality, as much as presenting those materials and the problematic role of us re-presenting - like our work here, poses important questions of representation.
Vladia Mihaylova: "What is interesting for me is the possibility for re-construction of both the educational and artistic (supported exhibition projects, artists, art events and organizations) activity and policy of the Center, which is deeply related with the perception, concept and today's state of contemporary art in Bulgaria. I think that it might be good to research the state of art after Soros Center, not only on the level of cultural policy but also on the level of aesthetics and visions of what is, actually, contemporality in a conservative scene and art institutions in Bulgaria.
POST FUNDING
[brochure]
TRY TO FIND ANOTHER COW
[round table discussion]
AND PRIVATE INVESTORS APPEAR
[article]
A SHORT INSTITUTIONAL AFFAIR
[exhibition]
WHO ARE THOSE WE?
[talk]
EXTERIORS
[catalogue]
HE LAUNCHED A MACHINE
[lecture]
SPEAKING OF A GAP
CAN CAUSE DOUBLES [exhibition]
