NAVIGATION 2023: ІNTEGRATION PROGRAM FOR ARTISTS

Exhibition

The exhibition project summarizes the work of the Navigation 2023 program’s participants and displays their individual or collective art projects.

Continuing their artistic practices, uniting with others in collaboration, the participants created and are exhibiting nine projects that represent their experience with living in the time of war on the individual level or as a part of larger and smaller communities. 

The artists are experiencing death, destruction, and the inability to return home or to their previous lives. The loss of a sense of security, home, and close ones brings up the question of identity and who we are as a whole. The artists are discovering ways to speak about their traumas through voices of beasts, mangled fields, bizarre creatures, natural and unnatural/supernatural shapes. The ability to feel, be sensitive to oneself and the world of nature, be sympathetic, preserve memories, find connections, and talk about common things – becomes the saving grace.

Artists and works

Marharyta Zhurunova, Bohdan Lokatyr

Anxiety State

2023

installation

This installation is an adaptation of a land art project, the Anxiety State, created in 2022. The shapes of enlarged spikes of a brier rose are a direct reference of the authors to their experience of working with natural materials. Authors are working with space, contemplating the ways to bring a land art project into the dimensions of a gallery and keep its essence intact. 

“We all are always anxious and worried. Nothing is certain now, we have lost the sense of security. The safe spaces are gone, and everything can be seen as dangerous, even the most mundane things. The heart is pounding hard even if there’s no threat ahead. 

The safe spaces that brought a sense of comfort once before are now covered in spikes. How did they grow there, and what are their targets? Will they defend or harm? Such is the trembling, tense, anxiety state.”

Marharyta Zhurunova from Vinnytsia and Bohdan Lokatyr from Lviv have been working in collaboration with each other since 2015 in the areas of environment and land art. In their projects, artists reveal the themes of a human’s mutual influence and the landscape surrounding them.

Chechushkova Dariia

The Mutated Bestiary

Chapter “Invasive interventions”. From the “Ecorenaissance” series.

relief, zine, street art

The Mutated Bestiary is a series of relief images that depict the state of internally displaced persons in Lviv. The artist sees Lviv as an overcrowded ship that received traumatized people on board. Using the folkloristic style of medieval scholastic drawings, the author depicts the city as a shell and its new dwellers as mutated animals hiding in it. This project also observes the city’s transformation, which has changed harmoniously or forcibly over the past year.

Dariia Chechushkova is from Odesa. She studies the theory and history of art at the National Academy of Fine Arts. In her practice, she explores the relationship between people and the environment by working with space, also collecting contemporary folklore in her media diary blog. 

The author talks about her project:

“writing a historical saga, collecting modern folklore:

the medieval zoo -> hidden in shells -> transformed traumatized animals -> the fortress city -> the arche 

the “bestiary” synopsis is about mutation and losing humanity in the human being 

the “medieval zoo” synopsys is a metaphor on the relocated and traumatized refugees in Lviv 

Lviv is an overcrowded “fortress city” for which the state of invasive intervention became historically common

invasive intervention*

*invasion is the takeover of a region by a foreign biological species to increase its habitat range. Environmental changes cause it. 

New continuous symptoms appeared – loss of empathy, detachment, separability, insularity, as a result of forced relocation. The city appeared to be silent, overwhelmed, confused. 

Feeling: alienated. The false happiness of “normal life”.

Status: hidden.

Process: mutation, adaptation, invasion.

A new psychogeography developed, new paths along the chthonic river, walking in circles, paving of new routes, all roads lead to the sea, to the places where I was happy or had just a glimpse of happiness.

If the ship sailed to Lviv, where’s the big water here?

Everyday I’m walking down the river that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Iryna Loskot

The Peremoha (The Victory)

2023

video, 2:31

The video work was created based on the film “Your Breath, Earth…” (1986). The plot of the film praises the work of Ivan Kisenko, the head of one of the most productive collective farms of Ukraine at the time, “Peremoha”. In said film, one can see how nature is compared with an enemy, crops harvesting with battlefields, working in a collective farm with war. Also, the exploitation of lands and animals can be seen. In the second part of the video, we see the images of nature on a chess board. By the saying of Ivan Kisenko, “nature plays white, and man reacts on its move”. In the author’s opinion, the film’s narrative justifies exploitation as a phenomenon by depicting interaction with nature as with an enemy in war. The same notion underlies the policy of imperialist war.

Iryna Loskot

The Bird Song, 2023

video, 1:28

One associates the harmony of nature with the song of a bird. Usually, it illustrates “peaceful” sounds in the media. The cheerful chirping of birds is sometimes used to censor inappropriate sounds or words. With her video, the author strives to expose the illusion of a peaceful soundscape and the invisibility of the problems of exploitation and violence. 

Iryna Lokost is an artist from Kharkiv. She creates performances and videos. Rethinks common points of view and creates works that problematize and provoke the viewer to pay attention to uncomfortable topics. Iryna uses an interdisciplinary approach in her projects, changes mediums and methods of work with each new project. Her preferred themes are memory, interaction with urbanistic environments, and identification. 

Nadiia Velychko

The Earth, 2023

ceramics

A series of ceramic tiles that depict landscapes was created based on the aerial photographs of Ukrainian fields after artillery shelling. “Changing the angle of view and scale makes these landscapes almost unrecognizable, turning them into abstract works. Same with war – it often seems to be something far away and abstract. But the mangled fields are real.”

Nadiia Velychko, artist and designer from Kharkiv. She works with graphic design, collages and ceramics.

Sofiia Bylym

What Can I Say About Sky, 2023

linocut on fabric

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Sofiia Bylym, artist from Kharkiv. Studied at the Kharkiv Academy of Design and Arts, works in graphics, illustration, and graphic design. In her practice, Sofiia uses subjective stories to research the values of humanistic ethics and their viability.

Illia Todurkin

Body Covering, 2023

soil, fabric

To create this installation the author combines several practices in order: collecting pieces of earth around the city for a month, molding collected soil into shapes of human bodies, and covering those bodies with drawings. Revealing the theme of understanding death through a personal story, the artist gives the main role to the process of creating the work itself, so each stage of the project and the choice of materials are not accidental. Illia thoroughly described the process:

“Each stage shaped my thought process in a certain way: digging out dirt, I noticed how the city governs and manipulates earth, affects places where the soil is covered and where it’s not. Walking through Lviv, I thought about the cities, I thought about my Mariupol and compared them, thought how the ground is a portal, is a composition of the dead, which creates a universal monument out of everything. 

“When molding bodies out of soil, I was thinking about the life and death of my classmates Danylo Kozlov, Liia Kyrylova and her little sister, who died this year in Mariupol. I dedicate this work in their memory. For me the act of covering the body with fabric always was equal to the act of viewing (wake). I imagine that the fabric can tell a story, I would like that when my time comes my body also was covered in a story or drawing. I can imagine how many bodies can’t be identified, can’t be found, they are forever hidden somewhere in dirt. So I borrowed a piece of earth’s memory.”

Illia Todurkin was born in Mariupol and studied at NAOFA at the Faculty of Graphics. When he moved to Odesa, Illia joined a group of artists named OSRZ-2; he was working in performance with them. Also works with graphics and sculpture. Among the practices of the artist are the change or addition of space, creating images or drawings based on a situation or experience, observation of inanimate objects, “living” and inanimate spaces, immaterial relations and states of material objects. 

Daria Molokoiedova

The Stolen Art, 2023

multimedia installation

This installation is a reconstruction of previous artworks of the artist that were created before the 24th of February 2022 and had to be left in Kramatorsk and Kharkiv. 

“After the full-scale invasion my reality was stolen as well as my artworks that became the witnesses of a different life. Involuntarily, I try to actualize them, which further kills their context. The project Stolen Art is my mourning over my life before and my previous works, also symbolizes their rebirth into new ideas. Thanks to a certain neural network and on the basis of photo documentation of lost works, I created cloned images that now are living their own life in a new reality. What did the original look like? Do any of these resemble the original? 

Somewhere in the parallel universe the war didn’t happen and I still can paint flowers on the brims of plates”.

Daria Molokoiedova, an artist from Kramatorsk, studied at the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts. Among the mediums with which the artist works are video, objects, and graphics.

Anton Malynovskyi

The rocket ship made of cigarette packs, 2023

object

“The idea to create this project came to me in 2020. Then the rocket ship symbolized for me the returning home. In my small hometown I felt at home only when I was little. My grandpa used to make paper robots out of cigarette packs, they became for me the symbol of those times. And a rocket ship is another symbol of coming home for me: when I was a kid, I had a book with puzzles about an alien who’s rocket crashed on Earth and lost some parts. So he and other characters must solve puzzles to find missing parts, so the alien could fix his spaceship and return home. With the start of a full-scale invasion, the rocket* started to symbolize something else — the loss of home. So now the accumulation of those different definitions constitute a symbol of the impossibility/loss of the possibility of returning home, to childhood, to the previous carefree life”.

*The words “rocket” and “missile” are the same in Ukrainian.

Anton Malynovskyi is from Snihurivka, Mykolaiv district and for the last few years lived and worked in Kharkiv. In his practice, Anton uses such media as photography, video, installations, objects. He is a member of the MYPH photography school.

Yuliana Alimova

How much is hryvnia?, 2020 — ongoing

augmented reality

“How much is hryvnia?” is a project in augmented reality, a part of the ART-Conversion project. It derived from the almost rhetorical question – how do artists make money? Maybe they draw it? So I decided to draw as many bills as I needed and to live off of them for some time by exchanging them with people for the real bills in a one-to-one ratio. This project raises the question of relationship between an artist and money, the value of work of an artist, its worth in money, as well as the subjectivity of evaluation of works by the viewer, buyer, author, collector, critic, etc. When someone asks me “How much is hryvnia?” referring to this project, my answer is: “one to one”.

AR-media and Artivive app allows the artist, in a metaphorical sense, to reach into the viewer’s pocket but not to take something out of it, but on the contrary, to put his works there and create a reason to look closer at modern Ukrainian money bills, that we always have in our pockets. With the help of augmented reality, every viewer automatically becomes the holder of a work of art and always has access to it. 

To see the objects in augmented reality, we kindly urge you to install the Artivive app on your smartphone. Then take the hryvnia bill and aim your phone camera on it. The app can be used for all banknotes except the one hryvnia bill.

Yuliana Alimova is an artist from Kharkiv, studied at KhDADM, engages in conceptual art, environment projects, experiments with the use of virtual and augmented reality. The main themes of Juliana’s works are play, mysticism, everyday magic, environments and spaces, self-observation and self-study, value and relativity, identity, and reality.