Background
The Ukrainian history of the past 3-4 generations highlights the reasons behind the broken mechanisms of memory preservation in Ukrainian families – Soviet collectivization and other economic, political, ideological, and ethnic repressions, the Holodomor, World War II, and the current Russian war in Ukraine. Just as back then, people are forced to move to other places, uprooting themselves and taking only the essentials. The most important things. Light-heavy, filled with emotions or functions. Those that speak to us from our past. And our parents’. And (great-)grandparents’. It is fortunate if something memorable has been preserved. But what about the lost things? Where is the memory of them kept? Some of it is in our memories, in our movements, actions. In our attention. And also in our relatives. Who remembers in our families? And ultimately, how can we be carriers of family memory?
What is the program about?
The artistic-community program “Who Remembers” aims to work with the theme of family memory and its preservation within the family, ways of passing on memories from generation to generation. Through participatory artistic and non-artistic practices, all participants will try to inspire each other to explore their own family histories, tell them, and preserve them.
What awaits us at the meetings?
Over three weeks, we will listen to ourselves and others, delving into the topic of family memory. We will gather ways of sharing family stories, as well as discover new ones. We will look for different forms to document our experience and fill the space with our “work in progress.” The meetings will include movement practices and hands-on activities. Most practices will take place in a playful format. Examples of some practices: voicing a memory or describing an object; marking maps; moving in space – individually and in groups; making comics, postcards, collages.
What does “artistic-community program” mean?
It is a creative interaction through artistic or mixed practices between artists and participants who may or may not have known each other before. As a result of such interaction, everyone involved becomes co-authors of a shared process of being together, playing together, sounding together, moving together, and/or creating a collective art object. At the same time, there is space for individual expression.
One of the important aspects of artistic-community programs held at the Jam Factory Art Center is attention to good neighborliness. This year’s program will once again serve as a platform for meetings between residents of Pidzamche, Rohatka, Znesinnya, and the surrounding areas, and for community-building together with resident artists and the art center team.
Program Schedule
August 1 – 18, 2024
Meetings will take place on Thursdays and Saturdays:
– Thu 18:30-20:30
– Sat 12:00-16:00
The program starts on August 1, 2024. The final meeting is on August 18, 2024. A total of 6-7 meetings are planned:
Address: Lviv, 124 Bohdana Khmelnytskoho Street.
MagiC Carpets
The Jam Factory Art Center implements the program as part of the Magic Carpets platform.
“MagiC Carpets” is an international art platform created in 2017 that gives evolving artists and curators an opportunity to start their own “magical trip” by collecting local stories all around Europe and telling them in other countries through their art. The project is co-financed by the EU Program “Creative Europe”.
Jam Factory Art Center became a member of “MagiC Carpets” in January 2020.
For further information, visit this page.
Artists
Asia Tsisar is a Ukrainian curator, writer, and researcher focused on the region of Central and Eastern Europe. Coming from a background in Cultural Studies (Kharkiv State Academy of Culture, Ukraine) and Eastern European Studies (Warsaw University, Poland), she has developed her practice at the intersection of art, cultural studies, and political history. Her work employs methods of artistic research and creative storytelling, archival practices, narrative analysis, and memory studies. Since 2014, she has developed projects related to sensitive points in the histories of communities, such as Miller Flat, an apartment museum organized to rethink the problematic aspects of decommunization in Ukraine, and The Calendar, dedicated to the intersections between art and political history in Belarus. Since 2020, Tsisar has been the chief curator of the Secondary Archive, the largest digital archive dedicated to female artists from Central and Eastern Europe. She is currently based in Ukraine and is working on a collection of essays dedicated to these travels.
Olha Marusyn is an artist, choreographer, researcher, and designer who was born in Lanchyn, Ukraine, in 1986 and now lives in Lviv.
Her interdisciplinary practice combines choreography, performance, video, and work with text. The main medium of the artist is her own body, which often extends into the environment. Marusyn was a member of the performative collective Abstract Finger (points to nothing), a co-founder and active resident of the soma.workshop initiative. Through her own body and habits, as well as their reassessment, she tries to understand the time in which she lives and to address questions of the past and the future.
During the full-scale war, the artist began working on the project “Exercises Around Emptiness,” the material of which she wants to share with the participants of the residency. Through simple movements and memory, we will recreate objects that we have lost or do not have access to. These are exercises to place memory in our own bodies, to lighten it a bit, and make it visible to others, without risking anything. Such a practice does not require any previous performative experience.
Liubomyr Tymkiv was born in Lviv in 1975. He graduated from the Lviv College of Decorative and Applied Arts, named after I. Trush, specializing in wood carving, and the Lviv Academy of Arts, specializing in restoration. He also completed postgraduate studies at the Lviv Academy of Arts, specializing in art history. His practice as an artist, poet, and researcher of Ukrainian ancient sacred art finds its place outside institutional frameworks and, literally, beyond the physical environment: in the Internet environment in the form of strange and witty blogs/virtual exhibitions and through constant correspondence with artists and non-artists from all over the world, each visual message of which is somewhat altered after a delicate and not necessarily noticeable “intervention” of drawings, inscriptions, or applications by Tymkiv himself. These two directions are combined in the artist’s third creation – a garage gallery right in the yard of his own house. It is there, in the heart of the private sector on the outskirts of Lviv, that Tymkiv occasionally exhibits postcards, graphics, and “zines” of his foreign correspondents, as well as shoots videos for his virtual projects. At the meetings of the “Who Remembers” program, Lyubomyr plans to touch on the topic of pleasant memories by creating collages, postcards, handmade books, photographs, stickers, and stamps.
Art Center Team
Program and Executive Director: Bozhena Pelenska
Operational and Executive Director: Tetiana Fedoruk
Program Curator: Anna Gaidai
Program Manager: Sofiia Korotkevych
Communications: Lesia Dunets, Yuliana Chorna
Financial Support: Rymma Hladka, Nataliia Pidtserkovna
Design: Katya Drozd
Photo: Ira Sereda
Program Team
Partners
