This is not an ideal time
Curated by Anastasiya Shelest
April 7 - May 6, 2022
Closing Reception: Thursday, May 5th
Over the course of the last month, our identity as Ukrainians has changed. The brutal invasion of our land has shaken us to our core but for most, strengthened what our culture means to us. Unlike the countless other attacks Ukraine has suffered at the hands of the Russian Federation, this one has an audience. For the first time in a century, the world has a front-row seat to the genocide of the Ukrainian people.
This is not an ideal time for this show, but with everything that has gone on in Ukraine over the last month, it's clear that the ideal time will never come. So many lives have been destroyed, irreparable damage has been done to our culture and the merciless attacks on our land have placed us, Ukrainians, in a cycle of grief. For those of us lucky enough to have not been on the ground when the Russian troops marched into our country, we wake every morning with survivors' guilt and grief.
Still, we must go on and once this hell is over, we will rebuild. There is no other choice. We will not be erased from history. We will overcome. -Anastasiya Shelest
This is not an ideal time, curated by Anastasiya Shelest, features contemporary Ukrainian artists, Luba Drozd and Lesia Maruschak, and a rotation of photographers currently based in Ukraine, Mikhail Palinchak, Roman Pashkovskiy, and Eduard Kryzhanivskyi.
A portion of the profits will be donated to Razom for Ukraine, to support humanitarian efforts in Ukraine.
Luba Drozd creates site-specific sound and 3D animation installations that include sculptural elements. The works are composed of vibrations that form sonic spaces alongside architectural projections. Her synthetic spaces examine tangible and intangible structures of authority and its manifestations in a built environment.
Using vibrations of motors attached to bass piano strings to arrange sound compositions within the sculptural and 3D animated space, the components of her site-specific works continuously interconnect with architecture and each other. The constructed elements within these installations serve as sound objects, sound conduits, analog amplifiers as well as spatial reconstructions.
The sound compositions within her installations are audible without the use of transducers or speakers. Architecture, sculptures and the environment become the amplifiers of vibrating compositions, ushering a full-body listening. The pieces choreograph the viewer through space, with each step unfolding a new set of perceptual relationships. The installation materials reference the environment they are installed in, gesturing to how intangible spaces within us such as memory, knowledge, and perception are controlled and regimented.
Lesia Maruschak creates montages which are bound to paper, layered in space, and activated as performance pieces through the reinterpretation of archival, photographic, and painting conventions to explore their political-philosophical potential and her responsibility as an artist. An excerpt from her traveling work Project MARIA will be on display in this exhibition. Project MARIA has been on a tour of Ukraine since 2019. The installation closed in Kharkiv, Ukraine due to Russia’s invasion. The installation continues to hang in the Semeradsky Gallery, Kharkiv and is to open in the Western part of the country this summer.
Project MARIA was inspired by a single vernacular photograph of a young girl, Maria F., who survived the Holodomor and currently resides in Canada. Holodomor refers to the famine manufactured by Soviet policies during their occupation of Ukraine which, despite an estimated death toll of over four million, remains largely ignored in the context of global genocides. Canada has the world’s third-largest population of people of Ukrainian descent, and thus is home to countless members of the Ukrainian diaspora who continue to mourn this largely unwritten atrocity and carry a legacy of descendant trauma.
Mikhail Palinchak (Uzhgorod, Ukraine, 1985) is a Ukrainian street and documentary photographer residing and working in Kyiv, Ukraine. Born into a photographic family, Palinchak started taking photographs in 2008. He is a member of both the Ukrainian Photographic Alternative (UPHA) and of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers (UAPF). From 2014 through 2019 Palinchak was the official photographer of the fifth President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko. Palinchak is the founder of Untitled magazine and co-founder of the Ukrainian Street Photography group. He has exhibited his work internationally and has been published commercially.
Roman Pashkovskiy (Ukraine, 1984) graduated from Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts, Photography Department, in 2008. Pashkovskiy began his career in commercial photography, but his interest in experimentation with genres, forms, and context led him to Viktor Marushchenko's School nearly a decade ago. Since then, Roman Pashkovskiy has been working with social landscapes, intimate portraits, as well as conceptualized commercials. Roman Pashkovskiy has exhibited his photographs in group and solo shows such as “Up” (Radisson Hotel Kyiv, 2009), Crimea Dreams (French Institute in Ukraine, 2014), MirArt (Boryspil International Airport, 2015), group exhibition at a private gallery in Geneva, Switzerland (2015), Kyiv Art Week (Toronto-Kyiv Business Center, 2017), Gallery 48 (Kyiv, 2017).
Eduard Kryzhanivskyi/Edik Kryzhanovsky (Kyiv, Ukraine 1993) is a photojournalist residing and working in Kyiv, Ukraine. Kryzhanivskyi’s interest in photography started during the Maidan Revolution in 2014, while he was working as a journalist for 24 Kanal. Thanks to the mentorship of his colleagues at 24 Kanal, his fascination with photography grew into a career. Kryzhanivskyi worked as a journalist and photo correspondent until 2019. He then took on the photographer role in the office of the Prime Minister of Ukraine from 2019 to 2020. Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, Kryzhanivskyi served as the photographer for the office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs.