The Jam Factory Art Center is coming to Dnipro with a guest program! We invite you to the educational program about contemporary theater, the black box | “Production of Memory,” consisting of three lectures and a roundtable discussion.
Production of Memory
The trauma of war affects the entire society, our future, and our past. The role of artists and creative practices is crucial to begin the healing process. Forty-four million people in Ukraine and abroad are experiencing war at this very moment. Ukrainian artists will be at the forefront of rebuilding and restoring the destruction left by the war in our hearts and minds. We’re talking about the vision of ethical creation. We haven’t stopped producing values through artistic practices or in other ways. This part will be devoted to talking with practitioners. We will discuss the “black box” in the artistic field. Who programs it and how it captures reality.
Curator of the program: Veronika Skliarova
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
10.21. Saturday
- 16:00 – Halyna Hleba “The Archive of War Art as a Crutch of Memory: A Chronology of Events and Images”
- 19:00 – Liuba Ilnytska “What Is Worth Remembering: How Theater Produces History”
10.22. Sunday
- 16:00 – Yelyzaveta Smith “What ‘Language’ Does Ukrainian Cinema Speak and What Are We Silent About Today? (Focus on documentaries and fiction films of recent years)”
- 19:00 – Roundtable discussion: “Production of Memory: Art and/or Values” moderated by Yaroslav Futymskyi
The lectures and speakers
Halyna Hleba “The Archive of War Art as a Crutch of Memory: A Chronology of Events and Images”
The speaker will share her experience in forming a full-scale war art archive from the first days to today. She will also show other archival initiatives to preserve art and visual culture in war. How does art reflect the moods and reactions of society? When does art stop being reactive and find time and space to create reflections? What does the archive store, and how will it be useful for us in the future? These and other questions will be discussed during the meeting.
Halyna Hleba is an art critic, and curator of exhibition and archival projects. She is the author of publications on Ukrainian art and photography and has served as a lecturer on global art. She worked at the Research Platform PinchukArtCentre on the formation and conceptualization of the Grynyov Art Collection of Ukrainian art and was a guest editor of the first two issues of the magazine about Ukrainian photography SALIUT (Osnovy publishing). Currently, she works with the team of the NGO Museum of Modern Art, co-curates exhibitions in Ukraine and abroad, and is the managing editor of the digital “Archive of Military Art.”
Liuba Ilnytska “What Is Worth Remembering: How Theater Produces History”
Due to its temporal nature, theater is unable to record anything. Like a cybernetic black box system, it has some kind of “input” for entering information and an “output” for displaying the results of its work. The mechanism of its work is impossible (or unimportant) to explain in detail, because every truly persistent attempt encounters a paradox. In her presentation, Liuba Ilnytska will examine the systematic and random selection and sifting of input data within the theater, including events, experiences, and voices. As the output, this information has the potential to become history.
Liuba Ilnytska is a playwright and theatrical curator. She develops different strategies for problematizing stage fiction through documentary and physical theater methodologies. She focuses on topics such as collective memory, identity politics, and the socially engaged body. As a playwright, she has collaborated with directors Roza Sarkisian, Nina Khyzhna, and Svitlana Iliuk at the Lesia Ukrainka Theater in Lviv, Radio Kapital (Warsaw), Warta Theater, Jam Factory Art Center, Teatr Współczesny w Szczecinie. She is a curator of the Jam Factory Art Center theater program in Lviv.
Yelyzaveta Smith “What ‘Language’ Does Ukrainian Cinema Speak and What Are We Silent About Today? (Focus on documentaries and fiction films of recent years)”
- The experience of documenting this war on film since 2014, and what changed during a full-scale invasion.
- Cinema as testimony, and cinema as a way to experience trauma.
- The loss and production of meanings in the face of catastrophe.
- Truth in cinema, does it exist?
- The questions of choice in documentary filmmaking.
Yelyzaveta Smith is a director, screenwriter, producer, member of the Ukrainian and European Film Academies, Ukrainian Directors Guild, co-founder of TABOR production, and winner of the Grand Prix of the Berlin International Film Festival. After the full-scale invasion, Lisa has been working extensively with documentary materials and rebuilding a village in the Kherson region.
A roundtable discussion moderated by Yaroslav Futymskyi “Production of Memory: Art and/or Values”
- Is art a document or a testimony to wartime catastrophe?
- What does the exhibition of the looted museum tell us?
- Are performances in a shelled theater important/possible?
Yaroslav Futymskyi is a builder, performer, and poet, who works with everyday photography, domestic poetics, oral history, speech performativity, and language disintegration.