About the lecture:
The art of eastern Ukraine is artistic practices that work with infernal spaces, which include the symbolic potential of return, homesickness, delineating identities, problematizing economic relations during deindustrialization, and reacting to Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2014. In the lecture, we will talk about the works of Ukrainian and international artists who worked in the region and/or whose works are thematically related to the area. We follow how any old categories cease to work, and representations of the region in art change with the transition from a hybrid war in the region to a war of aggression to destroy Ukraine. Despite the deadly Russian aggression, the art projects implemented in 2014-2021 are evidence of the flourishing cultural life of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which Russia did not occupy until the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022.
About the lecturer
Dmytro Chepurnyi is an independent curator, and researcher of contemporary art. He lives and works in Kyiv. He was born in 1994 in Luhansk, north of the Donetsk coal basin. From 2016 to 2020, he cooperated with the Isolation fund. He graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Ukraine and interned at St. Andrews University in Great Britain, located on the North Sea. Curator of artistic residencies, including Landscape as a Monument (2020), When Was the Narrative Interrupted? (2022). Co-author of the publication “Curator’s Guide” (2020) together with Kateryna Yakovlenko and Oleksandra Pogrebniak and the publication “Boundaries of Collaboration: Art, Ethics and Donbas” (2022) together with Viktoriia Donovan and Dariia Tsymbaliuk.
