Visions of Ukraine

Opening of Online Exhibition: 13.05.22
Opening at Museum Folkwang, FilmBox: 20.05.22
A free publication is published as part of the exhibition.

For the exhibition project Visions of Ukraine, artist-curator Mykola Ridnyi was invited to conceive a selection of works from a young generation of artists and filmmakers that depict and shape Ukraine both in terms of its identity as well as its visions of the future. The works in the exhibition bring together different approaches to narrating with moving images: a non-linear montage of documentary videos, assembling amateur footage found online, and the translation of those documentarisms into CGI. Recorded fragments of social reality merge with fictional narratives and role-playing.

„Finally went to a shop. Refilled my stock with sugar and grains. Found a Louis Vuitton suitcase, Chinese replica. Very handy, I placed a medical aid kit there.“ (Uli Golub, Notes From Underground, 2016)

This collaborative exhibition project is an homage to the Ukrainian art scene, especially in the cities of Kharkiv and Kyiv, where Mykola Ridnyi worked for a long time and founded artist collectives and project spaces. These networks of young artists operate as critical, independent, transformative, and democratically organized communities and design diverse, empowering, and queer notions of the present and divergent futures. The exhibition unfolds visions of Ukraine from ten years of contemporary art and experimental filmmaking, gravitating at times towards rage, playfulness, irony, and other times towards hope.

„When should I look at the moon or read poetry, when I have to learn from history all the time.“ (Dana Kavelina, Why There Are No Monuments to Monuments, 2021)

Read the Statement by Mykola Ridnyi here.

Explore the online exhibition here.

Image: Fantastic Little Splash, Armed and Happy, 2019, 5’56’’ © the artists