Kyiv's Center for Contemporary Art struggles to survive (01/16/00)

Kyiv's Center for Contemporary Art struggles to survive

by Oksana Zakydalsky
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

KYIV - Established five years ago, the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Kyiv is the only professional art institution in Ukraine which deals with contemporary art. "Today, after five years of existence, we have no competitors," said Yuri Onuch, the director of CCA. "This is not a compliment; it is just a fact," he added.

Located in a building of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy on Skovoroda Street, the CCA is a Soros-funded institution, part of a network of 20 similar centers throughout Eastern and Central Europe and which, together with all such centers, now faces a new challenge.

Businessman-philanthropist George Soros has announced that his role as the chief sponsor of these art centers is ending and that the time has come for the various communities, national and local, to take over sponsorship. Understanding that a sudden cessation of funding would be a death sentence for the CCA in Kyiv, the International Renaissance Foundation has agreed to give it so-called "bridge support:" it will continue to fund the center up to the year 2002, but the funding will decrease by one-third each year and terminate in 2002.

"To guarantee its further existence, alternative funding formulas for the center must be developed during the next two years. The center will have to cease being a generous conveyor which passes money from New York on to the Ukrainian art community. We will have to find sponsors and partners for our work and projects," said Mr. Onuch.

The objectives of the center include the exhibiting, study and support of contemporary art in Ukraine and the presentation of Ukrainian contemporary art internationally. The program of the CCA, in the last two years, has been ambitious and extensive. There have been group exhibits of Ukrainian contemporary art and of art from Europe; solo exhibits of Vasyl Bazhai (Lviv), Andrii Sahaidakovskyi (Lviv), Taras Polataiko (Canada) and others. In October of this year, Mr. Onuch took a show of the works of Oleh Holosii and Mr. Sahaidakovskyi to France as part of the Days of Ukrainian Culture in Paris.

CCA also sponsors lectures, workshops, and research and documentation of contemporary art and supports art projects. Recently, the CCA held a three-day conference, "Visual Art of the 1980s-90's in the Context of the Culture of the 20th Century," to which over 40 speakers had been invited - many from outside Ukraine, including Austria, Poland, Macedonia, Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, Armenia, and Australia. Ihor Holubetzky, former director of the Power Plant (an artists' center) in Toronto, now curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, was one of the speakers.

Mr. Onuch is aware that the CCA's program will have to be scaled down in the future, but how much can be given up while maintaining the transparent and democratic nature of the institution? Ukraine provides an unfriendly environment for sponsorships, he noted, and it is not easy to get the attention of potential sponsors or partners.

A few spectacular events, bringing an international dimension to the center, are being staged in order to bring in the public and grab the attention of the media to give the center a higher profile. The first such blockbuster was the exhibit this past fall of the German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) that the center organized with the cooperation of the Goethe Institute in Kyiv.

More recently the CCA hosted a joint project of two of the creators and leaders of conceptual art - the American Joseph Kosuth and Dnipropetrovsk-born Ilya Kabakov.

Mr. Kabakov worked in Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s and moved to the United States in 1989; his works have rarely appeared in the former USSR. He has been chosen as one of the top 10 living contemporary artists by the magazine ARTnews (December 1999 issue). The exhibit - called "The Corridor of Two Banalities" - was originally held in 1994 at the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw and was spectacularly successful. However, for viewers in former Soviet countries, conceptualism has remained largely undiscovered.

The Kabakov-Kosuth project consists of two rows of tables facing each other and provides a commentary on life in the two different countries.

In Kabakov's case it is the USSR. He places elements of official Soviet iconography - familiar to generations - on his tables, together with actual denunciations and accusations concerning trivial things written by people living in a single communal apartment. Such a juxtaposition alludes to the abyss between the ideal of Homo Sovieticus and the behavior of some members of this ideal.

The other side of the row of tables is Kosuth's American territory - a cool, grey table surface of tastefully silkscreened words of great men: politicians, writers, historical figures. After a while, one sees that the words often contradict each other.

According to Mr. Kosuth, both he and Mr. Kabakov work within a context and in this case it is the reality of two worlds that have, between them, a line of division as well as something in common: man, words and ideals.

The exhibit was held up at the Polish-Ukrainian border where - in spite of papers from the Ministry of Culture indicating that the shipment was an art exhibit - customs demanded duty on the importation of 120 used tables and would not release the goods until the money was paid. The exhibit was installed just in time for the opening, attended by Mr. Kosuth, on December 3.

The CCA has been successful in persuading the Andy Warhol Museum of Pittsburgh to send a Warhol exhibit to Kyiv this spring; this will be the first time that the Carpatho-Rusyn's works have been given a show in Ukraine.

Gradually, the center is building up a roster of sponsors and partners, preparing for the day when Mr. Soros stops paying the bills.

For example, the Canadian Embassy helped in bringing the Polataiko show to Kyiv, and the Canadian consul, Marvin Wodinsky, has said that "the center occupies a unique and necessary position at the cutting edge of the Ukrainian cultural community."

The U.S. Embassy assisted with the Kabakov-Kosuth project and arranged the discussions with the Warhol Museum. LOT Polish Airlines and Austrian Airlines also provided support to the Kabakov-Kosuth exhibit.

The center is also beginning to acquire sponsorship from the private sector: the general manager for Sony Overseas has said that the "CCA - the most important contemporary art institution in Ukraine - utilizes in its programming a lot of new technologies and we at Sony Overseas are proud to be the sponsor of many innovative art projects created at CCA."

Thus, there are promising signals that the CCA is gradually carving out a reputation as a contemporary European-type art institution. One can only hope that it is able to get the kind of support among society that is standard in other European countries.

Information on CCA projects and exhibits can be found on its website at http://www.cca.kiev.ua/.

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