THE ART SCENE: Soros-funded gallery promotes visual culture (03/17/96)

THE ART SCENE: Soros-funded gallery promotes visual culture

by Marta Kuzma

KYIV - The Soros Center for Contemporary Art Gallery is the first gallery in Ukraine devoted to a comprehensive and continuing program of contemporary visual art. And, it is the only physical gallery structure that philanthropist George Soros has funded in the region, marking a substantial financial commitment on his part devoted to promoting contemporary visual culture in the country.

The commitment to fund such a gallery came out of a personal discussion with Mr. Soros at the Venice Biennale in 1993 that related to the lack of a logical infrastructure for the development of contemporary art in Ukraine. Following a two-year search for an appropriate location, and a series of conversations with Viacheslav Brukhovetsky of the University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy on the benefits of housing a contemporary art institution on the grounds of a university, the decision was made to create the future SCCA Gallery within the original academic corpus of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, a building dating from the 17th century.

Following a seven-month period of renovation and restoration, the gallery opened to the public on October 29, 1995. Formally referred to as the Soros Center for Contemporary Art at the University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, the center will serve as a forum for experimentation for a younger generation of Ukrainian artists.

As well, it will serve as a site for comprehensive exhibitions that survey major movements in the development of contemporary art in Ukraine. Such proposals include an exhibition examining the movement related to non-conformist paintings from the 1960s and 1970s in Ukraine; and an exhibition titled "Southern Cool," which will examine the Conceptualist Movement in Odessa dating from the late 1970s through the 1980s.

Within the first three month of its gallery activity, the SCCA held three exhibitions. The fall exhibition, titled "Bred in the Bone," opened in November 1995 and explored the role of memory and nostalgia in forming perception. Participating artists presented works that integrated adapting cultural forms, several drawing out of a painterly tradition and others from a technical one (i.e. from photography and film).

Work exhibited included that of artists Oleh Tistol (participant in the 1994 Sao Paolo Biennale), Mykola Matsenko, Iliya Chichkan (participant of the major international art exhibition "Manifesta," which will open in the Netherlands in June), Boris Mikhailov (participant in the upcoming Sydney Biennale in July), Serhiy Bratkov, Oleksandr Hnilitski and Julia Kissina. Film work by the French filmmaker Patrick Bokanowski dating from the 1970s was shown during the exhibition.

The SCCA program in Kyiv received a separate grant from the Open Society Institute in January 1995 for the purpose of organizing the first international workshop for young curators from the former Soviet bloc. In tandem with the fall exhibition, the SCCA Gallery hosted the program, which included 23 curators from such countries as Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Yugoslavia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania.

Lecturers for the program included Peter Osbourne, lecturer of philosophy at Middlesex University in London, who spoke on the topic "Beyond Traditional Aesthetics: From Art History to Visual Culture"; Peter Doroshenko, an American of Ukrainian descent and former curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston; Lynne Cooke, curator at DIA Center for Visual Arts in New York; Vasif Kortun, director of the museum at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale on Hudson, N.Y.; Jonathan Watkins, curator at the Serpentine Gallery in London; Bart de Baere, former curator for Dokumenta in Kassel, and curator of the Dutch Representation at the 1995 Venice Biennale; Geert Lovink, media theoretician and former editor of Media Matic in Amsterdam; Martine Mounot, video curator at the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris; and Matthias Flugge, editor of Neue Bildene Kunst in Berlin.

The results of the workshop were positive in many ways, specifically in securing several Ukrainian artists the opportunity to participate in premiere international art exhibitions in the future year.

The second, more light hearted, gallery event was titled "The Hermetic Forest." This event provided artists the opportunity to creatively manifest the traditional decoration of the Christmas Tree. The public was requested to celebrate outdoors in the snow, while the art objects, the "trees," were placed throughout the gallery interior. Over 10 artists were invited to realize their creativity, the results of which included a whirling tree titled "The Frantic Christmas Tree," which spun continuously in full revolution; "The Red-Hot Christmas Tree," decorated by eight video monitors, each conveying a rose-toned, fire accompanied by full visual effects; "The Tree of Lost Memory," surrounded by a prism of neon tubes; and many others. A large Christmas tree stood in the main gallery, and the entire artistic community from Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv and Lviv was invited to hang ornaments. Visitors were greeted by mulled wine and candles on the grounds of the gallery.

The most recent exhibition, titled "The Colonization of the Object," included work by Tamara Babak from Kyiv and Oleksandr Lisovsky from Odessa. Ms. Babak is an artist who creates large-scale objects from willow branches by traditional methods applied to Gobelin weaving. Mr. Lisovsky utilizes antique and found objects, integrating them into assemblages illuminated by artificial light sources. "Colonization" refers not only to the aura of the exhibition, which hints of a time at the turn of the last century, but also focuses on the art process applied by each artist.

Further plans for the SCCA Gallery include an exhibition of video art to be held in June of this year, and a full retrospective of the work of Boris Mikhailov from Kharkiv, a photo-artist who recently had personal exhibitions at the Portikus Gallery in Frankfurt, the Kunsthalle in Zurich, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (November 1995). This exhibition will mark the artist's first full retrospective.

The SCCA Board continues to include such notable figures as Konstantin Akinsha, contributing journalist to ARTnews, and recent author of "Stolen Treasures: The Hunt for the World's Lost Masterpieces," a book much publicized in America, England and Germany, dedicated to the topic of "trophy art" - the vast number of priceless paintings, sculptures and other artifacts that had been systematically gathered by Stalin's officials in Germany at the end of the World War II and shipped back to Russia as compensation for treasures looted and destroyed by Hitler.

For further information on the gallery and its programs, phone or fax 380-44-416-0093.

Marta Kuzma is director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv.

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