From the FGE project. Departure, 1996 (Olegivska Street, Kyiv)
out any pathos, December, to underscore our agnosticism towards various art trends. December is the last month of the year, rife with desolation and melancholy leave-taking of the past. Besides, that was a snowy year with giant snowdrifts. Our studios on Olegivska were as good as cut off from the world. While biting cold and blizzards raged outside, our studios were hot; we could use as much gas, electricity and water as we liked, because nobody checked up on abandoned houses. This is how we worked on “paintings for the show,” without any rush, without any desire to prove ourselves. Art communication of the 1990s was based on hosting art projects in various public venues and documenting them in the only active journal of the time, Terra Incognita. Varvarov and us organized group shows at studios and venues that were never used for exhibitions: on Kyiv hills, in the choreography class of the Karpenko-Karyi Institute of Theater (1994), at Slavutych Palace of Culture (1995). Artists had to be jacks-of-all-trades, acting as curators, gallerists, sponsors, what have you. In the late 1990s, I came up with the Fiction Gallery Expedition (FGE) project; its realization lasted into 2006. The Departure performance (1996; participants: I. Konovalov, A. Varvarov, V. Zaiichenko, S. Kornievskyi, K. and O. Meletynskyi) marked the initiation of the project. It was a singular artistic intervention into the landscape of Kyivan hills. The projected strategy for exploring the society offered new communicative models. It emphasized direct connections to people, unmediated by the institutionalized art establishment, through the so-called “qui-
et cultural interventions,” which placed brick and cement sculptures in various environments. The conceptual FGE project proceeded illegally, without permissions from the regime and administration, as guerilla art. It acquired a new meaning for each viewer. Its goals and history were shrouded in legends and documented in cinema (Urban Landscape, 2007) and in pictures on the Internet. The 10-year history of the noncommercial FGE project invites us to answer the question: can you treat these objects as “public art,” free of propaganda or agenda, not trying to feed the viewers any given “perspective,” or were they drawing attention to obscure “mythological zones” in Kyiv urban spaces? Analyzing the FGE within the context of global art movements allows me to identify it as an offshoot of land art, which I would define as hill art. Building objects on Kyivan hills was not an extreme goal. It was a unique synthesis of polisemantic spaces and the conceptually defined idea of the project. The FGE participants addressed the realities of contemporary art spaces and brought hill art into the framework of Ukrainian art phenomena of the late 20 th — early 21st century. The spread of IT technologies expanded methods of communication. After the FGE project was completed in 2006, I turned to painting. I approach my works through the lens of conceptual art and connect them to “infodelics” (it’s my own term derived from information and delos, which means clear), that is, the effect of huge information streams on human consciousness. The effect of the information world on the real world, our lifestyle and general outlook could not be imagined until very recently. “Information bunnies” lurking around us like invisible atoms in my paintings are a metaphor of these influences, the interventions of information “clones” into the world around us. The future, much like the past, is not real, so we should value what we have. Paintings with “information atoms” should inspire viewers to seek solace in our turbulent world. My paintings unmask this temptation, highlighting empty promises and CGI joys of “the consumerist heaven” of the early 21st century. Paintings inspire viewers to grasp and notice how natural communication in real spaces gets replaced with impulses in microchips. Exploration of communications shall continue. In conversation with Galyna Sklyarenko
From the FGE project. Om-Aum, concrete, 2006 (Dytynka Mountain, Kyiv)
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