OCCUPY PPV #06: Art Histories from the Ukrainian South

5 May 2023

6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Location:

Mimosa House

47 Theobalds Rd

London

WC1X 8SP

Please join the conversation with curator Alexandra Tryanova on art histories from the Ukrainian South. Alexandra draws a speculative map of the region departing from artistic practices of different historical periods tied with the locality attempting to mark a unique northern Black Sea identity and matters that formed it.

The conversation will explore horizontal practices and community building, psychogeography, escapism, attitude to the body, music, and politics bridging Ukrainian South and Mediterranean culture.

Image: Stas Volyazlovsky “An non Spiritus Existunt?”, mid-2000, textile, ball-pen.

Registration is free but essential.

Speaker:

Alexandra Tryanova

Alexandra is an independent curator and researcher, a current fellow of the Jester (Genk, Belgium), and a member of the Culture Commons Quest Office at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (Antwerp University). She graduated from the Kask Curatorial Studies course in 2022 and holds an MA in Cultural studies and Law. In her research and practice, Alexandra focuses on artistic practices connected with recreation, gender, collective memory, and Eastern European avant-gardes. Recent projects and exhibitions: Just like Arcadia, Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp (2022); Series of online talks Conflict Zones at Jester, Genk (2022); Velniai, Klaipeda Cultural Communication Centre, Klaipeda (2021). Recent publications: Passivity: Between Resignation and Pacifism (co-edited with Pascal Gielen), 2023, Valiz, Amsterdam. Previously Alexandra held the position of curator at the Museum of Odesa Modern Art and PinchukArtCentre (Kyiv). Since 2017, She runs an independent non-production residency Kunsthalle Lustdorf based on temporary independent artistic and curatorial associations for open practices and technologies in the area of the Green Valley in the suburbs of Odesa. Lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.

This talk is a part of the public programme contextualising the exhibition I AM NOT HERE TO BE STRONGER THAN YOU co-curated by Daša Anosova and Alexandra Tryanova at Mimosa House in London. The show is the first major presentation of works by Alyona Tokovenko and AntiGonna - contemporary Ukrainian artists working with transgressive practices, radical intimacy, and personal traumatic memories.

In the exhibition, autobiographical narratives are manifested through the acts of (auto)eroticism, transgression and pornographic imagery incorporating painting, sculpture, installation, video, and viscerally embodied live art. Hurt and injured bodies are present in the gallery space in the form of moving image and morphing canvases, while pain, as a visual language, and a key theme of the artists’ works, addresses the politics of the moment.

The talk will take place in the exhibition space where the participants will have an opportunity to learn more about both artists' artistic practices. Learn more about the show here.

In partnership with FRINGE: UCL's Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity.

OCCUPY PPV #05: Curating "East" European Art

10 March 2023,

6:00 pm–8:00 pm

Location:

IAS Common Ground (G11)

Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)

South Wing, Wilkins Building, University College London

Gower Street, London

WC1E 6BT

Please join this talk with contemporary art curators from Cell Project Space (London) and Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw) discussing curating “East European” art. They are to address the challenges and issues around curating art from the region i.e. infamous “New East” narratives (that fetishized post-Soviet aesthetics often divorcing it from any real politicality) around contemporary art; “exotic” packaging as a consumption model for the Western gaze; as well as the questions of how an ongoing russian aggression further complicates the idea of a collective Eastern European identity.

Speakers:

Natalia Sielewicz

(Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw)

Natalia is an art historian and curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. In her exhibitions and essays, she addresses the issues of feminism, affect culture, biopolitics, and technology. The curator of the exhibitions: Fedir Tetyanych. The Neverending Eye (2022), The Dark Arts. Aleksandra Waliszewska and Symbolism of the East and North (2022, co-curated together with Alison Gingeras), Agnieszka Polska. The One-Thousand Year Plan (2021), Paint also known as Blood. Women, Affect, and Desire in Contemporary Painting (2019), Hoolifemmes (2017), an exhibition problematizing performativity and dance as tools of female resistance, the exhibition Ministry of Internal Affairs. Intimacy as Text (2017) on affect and the poetics of confession in literature and visual arts. She also curated Private Settings (2014), one of the first institutional exhibitions examining the impact of Internet 2.0 on the human condition in the age of late capitalism, and the exhibition Bread and Roses. Artists and the Class Divide (2015, with Łukasz Ronduda). She is part of the Sunflower Solidarity Center at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

Adomas Narkevičius

(Cell Project Space, London)

Adomas Narkevičius is a Lithuanian curator and art historian based in London and Vilnius, currently working as Curator at Cell Project Space, London. He is interested in nonlinear aspects of historical time as well as the body, sexuality, and the limits of representation. Adomas Narkevičius was Curator at Rupert Centre for Art, Residencies and Education. In 2020, his MA dissertation ‘Defiant Bodies: Untimely Art in the Baltics Under Soviet Rule’ at UCL, London, was awarded the Oxford Art Journal Prize. Among his recent selected projects are solo and two-person presentations ‘Dance As You Wrestle’ by Agnė Jokšė, Anastasia Sosunova; ‘Tensors’ by Cudelice Brazelton IV; ‘Sideways Looking’ by Peng Zuqiang; ‘A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me’ by Renée Akitelek Mboya at Cell Project Space; group exhibitions ‘The Prompt’ at Gianni Manhattan, Vienna (2022); ‘Authority Incorporeal’, Rupert, Baltic Triennial 14 (2021); ‘Avoidance’ at FUTURA, Prague (2021); symposium ‘Enacting Knowledges’ at Kaunas Artist House (2021) and the JCDecaux Emerging Artist Award at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius.

Moderated by the OCCUPY PPV: Politics and Aesthetics convenors Vlad(a) Vazheyevskyy (Goldsmiths) and Daša Anosova (SSEES UCL).

This seminar is organised in support of the forthcoming evening of 'Eastern' European anti-colonial solidarity at Cell Project Space on Saturday 11 March. Performances by spalarnia, Liudmila, drag and poetry readings by Taras Gembik, T & Vlad(a) Vazheyevskyy as well as books, artist editions and merch from 'Eastern' Europe and its diaspora in a collective effort to support queer people displaced by Russia's war in Ukraine. All ticket proceeds and your donations will go to NGO Insight, providing psychological and legal support; medicines, hormones and food; relocation and safe houses for permanent stay to LGBTQIA+ people during the war in Ukraine. Tickets could be booked via TicketSource

Follow OCCUPY PPV socials for more:

Web: ppv.life

Instagram: @ppv.life

Youtube: OCCUPY PPV

Visual credit: Voices of Love by Arsen Savadov and Heorhii Senchenko in “Alchemic Surrender,” 1994.

OCCUPY PPV #04 x Postsocialist Art Centre: Political Gardening

20 January 2023

6:00 pm - 8:00 pm (GMT)

Location:

IAS Common Ground (G11)

Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)

South Wing, Wilkins Building, University College London

Gower Street, London

WC1E 6BT

This event is free but registration is essential.

Kateryna Aliinyk, Ukrainian garden, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 200 × 160 cm. Courtesy: the artist. Learn more about this artwork here

A panel discussion with artists and curators on the political potential of horticultural practice with Raluca Voinea, Dana Olărescu and Darya Tsymbaliuk, hosted by Vlad(a) Vazheyevskyy (Goldsmiths), Daša Anosova (SSEES UCL) and Maja and Reuben Fowkes (UCL Postsocialist Art Centre).

Gardening as a political practice unearths the radical potential of non-exploitative, self-organizing and collectivist approaches to tending plants by confronting social and environmental injustices, challenging the mistreatment of displaced communities, as well as contesting the extractivist ethos of industrial agriculture. An Experimental Station for Art and Life in the Romanian countryside draws on cooperative socialist legacies to reimagine horticulture as a emancipatory platform for institution building, while inner London allotments are reclaimed as spaces of social inclusion by East European migrants sharing knowledge and care for the biotic communities of the soil. At issue also is the extent to which human and plant relations are transformed by uprooting and displacement, with the war in Ukraine posing urgent questions of solidarity and resistance that transcend political and species divides. Political gardening will be explored in this discussion as a strategy for grassroots action in defence of endangered communities, as a field of social struggle and eco-utopian imagining that echoes the subversive histories of rural rebellion and as a rapprochement with other-than-human worlds in troubled times.

Speakers:

Raluca Voinea is curator and art critic, based in Bucharest. Since 2012 she is co-director of tranzit.ro Association. From 2012 to 2019 she managed tranzit.ro space in Bucharest. Starting with 2021, the ideas and approach that configured this space are continued in a new project, The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, realised by tranzit.ro together with a group of artists and other cultural workers in a village north of Bucharest. Her work is grounded in a local context, yet open for transversal and transdisciplinary collaborations. Tranzit.ro / people

Dana Olărescu is a socially engaged artist with a focus on challenging minority exclusion and environmental injustice. Through participatory methodologies that democratise access to art and knowledge, she aims to give agency to underserved migrant groups and people habitually excluded from decision-making processes, so they can become active co-producers of culture. Between 2011 and 2018, Dana formed one half of There There, a performance company concerned with reclaiming Eastern European identity in the West. Recent publications include ‘Practising Migration’ in Art, Migration, and the Production of Radical Democratic Citizenship (2022).Dana Olărescu (danaolarescu.com)

Darya Tsymbaliuk (St Antony’ College, University of Oxford) is a writer, researcher and an artist whose work lies at the intersection of environmental humanities and artistic research, and engages with feminist and decolonial methodologies. She is currently a Max Hayward Visiting Fellow (2022 - 2023) at St Antony’ College, University of Oxford, having most recently obtained her PhD at St Andrew University with a thesis on Multispecies ruptures: stories of displacement and human-plant relations from Donbas, Ukraine. darya tsymbalyuk

This event is co-organised by the OCCUPY PPV: Politics and Aesthetics convenors Vlad(a) Vazheyevskyy (Goldsmiths), Daša Anosova (SSEES UCL), and Maja and Reuben Fowkes (UCL Postsocialist Art Centre) within the framework of the SAVA project

Please consider supporting Ecoplatform - a Ukrainian vegan-anarchist eco-organization that promotes principles of horizontality and evasion from anthropocentric ideology. Learn more about how anarchist and vegan initiatives participate in the resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine here.