Exhibition project ‘World for Everyone and For Everything’ presents the artworks by Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Himey, Oleksandr Burlaka, Studio 12345678910, Vitaly Yankovy, Katya Libkind and Stanislav Turina, Sergey Shabohin, Valentina Petrova, Daryna Mamaisur, Nikolay Karabinovych, Egor Antsygin. There is a three-dimensional model ‘Untitled Planet №2’, developed by artists Dana Kosmina and Alina Kleytman, which becomes a form for the online exhibition.

The exhibition project raises not a new question about the possibility of coexistence and cooperation for a common future. For most of the artworks, a metaphorical journey into a thematically-unknown merges with a journey into an unknown geography of Eastern Europe. As a result of artistic expression there is the materiality of the world – observation of the terrain, recalling history, telling stories or discovering the hidden. The world for everyone and for everything is a speculative landscape of the future, which presents an image of an inanimate space of a post-human planet. The model itself demonstrates the scenario of impossibility of cooperation for an acceptable way out of the crisis. As a continuation of reflections and topics raised during the collective work of ‘Landscape as a monument’ A-I-R programme, the artists present the temporality of the human landscape. The title of the exhibition, which remotely sounds like a socialist slogan and resembles the Ukrainian soviet past, is a paraphrase of Tim Ingold's interpretation of the 'sustainable world'. According to the anthropologist, a sustainable world and overcoming the crisis for humanity are only possible by taking into account the interests of everyone and everything, with a proper recognition of the idea of ​​equality and completeness (‘plenum’), the elements of which are in constant transformation. ‘Our skin peels off from our bodies and turns into dust, carbon that we exhale grows into plants. The attempt to equalize the opposition between man and landscape leads us to the conclusion that landscape is history that contains living memory of all of its dwellers. Observing a landscape is an act of memory.’

The project explores the topics introduced by the ‘Landscape as a Monument’ A-I-R programme initiated by the IZOLYATSIA with the support of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.
Curators: Oleksandra Pogrebnyak and Dmytro Chepurnyi

Model of the planet: Dana Kosmina, Alina Kleytman
Design: Dana Kosmina, Vitya Glushchenko
Website: Yurii Tymoshenko
Project management: Nina Tararueva
PR: Oleksandra Mayboroda
SMM: Kateryna Nesterenko


READING LIST

This reading list contains links to materials that inspired curators and participants of the Landscape As a Monument residency. We define landscape as a world in which we occupy a constantly moving point of view. The history of landscape conceptualization is, of course, much more contradictory and requires a separate discussion. During the residency and preparation for the World for All and for Everything exhibition, we looked for ways not to equate the landscape with a passive background for human activity. According to this task, we divided the reading list into three main topics.

The first selection is devoted to a way of looking at each feature of the landscape as a temporary assembly of different actors. This requires the recognition of the nonhuman agency, that is, matter as such. The second selection offers texts that problematize the landscapes as symbols of competing ideologies associated with the construction of national identities and the desire to keep them fixed. The third selection consists of materials that explore primarily the problems of the Ukrainian landscapes.

LANDSCAPE AS AN ASSEMBLAGE

- Tim Ingold, The Temporality of the Landscape
- Waste to Monument: John Latham's Niddrie Woman
- Claire Colebrook, The Intensity of the Archive
- Дар’я Цимбалюк, Память вугілля
- Margret Grebowicz course on Environmental Thinking (video)
- Anna Tsing, Blasted Landscapes (and the Gentle Arts of Mushroom Picking)

POWER, ICONOCLASM AND LANDSCAPES

- Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art
- W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power
- W. J. T. Mitchell, Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness
- Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory
- Esther Choi, Sustainability’s Image Problem
- Mariusz Czepczynski, Cultural Landscapes of Post-Socialist Cities: Representation of Powers and Needs

UKRAINIAN LANDSCAPES

- Степові ландшафти Донецької та Луганської областей, посібник, 2017
- Вплив військової діяльності на природу України, посібник, 2019
- Роман Лозинський, Краєвиди-ландшафти Галичини як культурна спадщина, 2020
- Володимир Приходько, Атлас Донбасу, 2017
- Тетяна Портнова, Ландшафти Донбасу, 2018
- Kulikov, Industrialisation and Transformation of the Landscape in the Donbas

Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Himey
So They Won’t Say We Don’t Remember, 2020
(video, 24')

Video by Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Himey interacts with the history and community of the town Myrnohrad, located in the steppe zone of the south-west of Donetsk range. Coal mines and the mining industry became key factors in the development of the town's infrastructure, determining the nature of estate development, the formation of areas, and the quality of the urban environment. The hidden underground architecture consisting of numerous mines has shaped the urban fabric over the last century. Today, with the passing of the era of industrial modernism, the decline of industrial facilities and the closure of mines, this hidden logic of urban structures gradually loses relevance, becomes less obvious or disappears altogether. These processes complicate the ability to understand the places and the people who live and work in the region.

Through their own experience, artists explore the landscape of Myrnograd. The idea of ​​the work begins from a monument dedicated to miners and appeals to the memory of the tragedy that happened in 1977. Locals, together with artists walk the approximate route above the workings of the ‘Novator’ mine, closed forty years ago after the accident which led to the deaths of miners and rescuers that worked there. Today, the area above the surface is overgrown with shrubs, and infrastructure has turned into ruins.

The video documents the collective walk, which starts from the mine shaft, where workers mined for coal, and leads to the monument to the fallen miners, installed at the approximate site of the underground tragedy. Thus, a group of people walking on the surface through thickets, shrubs, roadside plantations, residential areas, the city square and the plowed field, perform a certain remembrance act. The very process of preparation for the performative action is inextricably linked with a search for exact places and symbolic recollection.

Oleksandr Burlaka
The Big Wild Fields Draft, 2020
video, 8'

Oleksandr Burlaka travels through the steppes of Eastern Ukraine, which was known as the Wild Field before the industrialization of the region. The historical name refers to the times of tension between the settled and nomadic peoples of the Black Sea steppe. In the XVIII century started a period of transformation of these areas into a large industrial region. Currently, it is worth talking about the post-industrial transformation of industrial areas. Thus, the field of view of the bicycle-travelling artist includes natural landscapes, ruins of medieval civilization and the remains of industrial objects.

To form a route, Oleksandr turned to field maps of the 17th century. The Book of the Great Drawing is a textual description of the historical stratification of the network of trade and military roads that have become the driving force behind the strengthening and urbanization of the region. The book contains descriptions of various territories, rivers, roads that interested the Moscow state of that time. The artist works with descriptions of the Muravsky and Izyumsky ways, he moves following the found text, and with the help of video he maps landscapes, creating a situation of simultaneous existence of narratives of the past-present-future.

The work is presented in the form of a series of eight two-channel videos, each of which combines different angles of observation of the environment: from the perspective of a human and a perspective of a drone moving over landscapes. The author captures the territory formed as a result of layers and preserves the memory about every stage.

Music: SELERA, Nogai song, 2020
Editing, subtitles: Lera Guevska

Studio 12345678910
Terrazzo of the Central Railway Station in Kyiv, 2020
photo, online broadcast, installation

The basis of the work is an observation of a Kyiv central railway station overpass floor transformation. The floor is made in the terrazzo technique, consisting of a mixture of cement mortar and crushed stones. According to the technology, a uniformly wear-resistant surface is formed, which is then leveled by grinding and polishing.

During the decades of overpass operation, streams of people heading to and from Kyiv wiped the floor surface with the soles of their shoes. We can say that they involuntarily carried out spontaneous polishing. This process revealed the stones that did not wear off and came out. They are more durable than others, and may have gotten into the terrazzo mixture by mistake. The abrasion ability of all parts of the mixture must be the same, thus deviations from the technology happened during construction.

Spontaneous polishing was layered upon the planned one, the difference in the properties of the components of the surface manifested itself as a new shape of the floor. Implemented in a specific landscape, the technological product was transformed under the influence of processes occurring in it.

In the studio work, the experience of spontaneous floor transformation is transferred to the field of production. The transformed technology is deduced from this. As part of the work, an attempt will be made to use this technology to create an experimental sample. A sample of a heterogeneous terrazzo mixture having a cylindrical shape will be processed on a modified lathe using shoes as a tool. Processing will continue until the sample loses its original shape and shows its structure. Part of the work will be a live broadcast of the machine's work.

Vitaly Yankovy
Transition Footprint, 2020
Performative action in space, screenshot, video, text

In his work, Vitaliy Yankovy uses data obtained from a mobile application that captures the user's routes by GPS coordinates. The digital trace from navigation in space is a sample of self-sufficient digital matter, which arises as a result of human activity and can be viewed through the optics of ‘dark theories’ - a posthumanist trend in philosophy.

The program captures the path traveled by the artist and visualizes the moment of transition from urban space to the forest. In the spatio-temporal dimension, this is a short but capacious interval during which the type of landscape changes. Vitaly gives agency to a digital footprint and sees in this inhuman form of presence something that causes anxiety and interest. As well as the forest, which is a space of living, unknown and elusive for human perception. Audial and poetic fragments of the work enhance the feeling of existential anxiety before the majestic.

The idea of ​​the work arose during the Landscape as a Monument A-I-R programme, which preceded the exhibition. Vitaly is performing one of the collective exercises proposed by the artist Pavlo Kovach. The experience of spontaneous wandering and the opportunity to get lost in the landscape provokes Vitaly to think about two different modes of movement in space, namely with the use of a navigator and without devices that record movement. This work also addresses the online format of the residency and what we leave behind by actively using technology.

Katya Libkind and Stanislav Turina
Can I Go Out, 2020
video, 17', text on A4

Katya Libkind's work (created together with Stanislav Turina) is a video documentation of a performance that did not take place. After spending six months at an art residence in Wroclaw, Katya turned to performance, trying it as a medium for her practice. Procedurality and action are often present in Katya's works, as well as their characteristic state of incompleteness and intention, which only intends to turn into something definite.

The two main categories identified by this video are performance and time. Time to transform fragments of thoughts and meanings into a message that is clear to others. The time that in this process ceases to belong to us, and the feeling of anxiety that fills this space.

Katya used to express her idea: ‘I want to stand over the abyss (maybe a theoretical abyss) with a few more people who want to stand with me. Feel the speed of our bodies relative to the speed of the landscape and its abyss. I want to constantly fall into reality. I want something to go wrong.’ Maybe the camera just manages to capture such a state?

The action takes place in a city park, so the complex inner landscape is intertwined with a colorful environment, filled with the sounds of forest and city at the same time. In the final frames, the internal voltage is released to the outside.

On a sheet of A4 paper Stanislav Turina records excerpts from the conversation.

Sergey Shabohin
Mandrake Gardens, 2020
two-channel video, 15'

Belarusian artist Sergey Shabohin collects an archive of events that took place in two parks: Hasenheide in Berlin and the Druzhby Narodov Park in Minsk (as well as Kyiv Square). Among the materials combined in two-channel video are field shootings, media stories and files from the Internet. The work, according to the author's intent, should be positioned in the exhibition space at a straight angle.

One part of the video is based on materials collected during the artist's residency in Berlin about raves and cruising (gay community practices to find a sexual partner in public). Due to the closure of nightclubs during the pandemic, Berliners began to organize illegal parties in parks. Thousands of raves in Hasenheide Park became especially noticeable. Dense plantings in the northern part of the park are becoming an attractive place for meetings of the queer community, cruising and orgies. Police peacefully dispersed the meetings, without detaining anyone, reminding them of the epidemic and the fact that birds, animals and insects in the parks also need to sleep.

Another screen captures events that took place during the same period in Belarus, where the election campaign took place. The current government, led by Oleksandr Lukashenko, has made the opposition's actions more difficult, arresting candidates and limiting campaign space. On July 30, 2020, the official picket of presidential candidate Svitlana Tikhanovskaya took place in the Druzhby Narodov Park in Minsk. And although the event took place on a weekday and far from the city center, tens of thousands of people came to the rally. Later, on August 6, three days before the election, it was not possible to repeat the success of this action. Authorities have banned events legitimized in the area before, and in Kyiv Square, where the action was moved, security forces made it impossible to hold a picket.

Both parks are in the center of the artist's attention. On two screens there is a parallel demonstration of the following different contexts: illegal raves - official pickets; soft reaction of the Berlin police - aggression of Minsk law enforcement agencies; sexuality of cruising - the energy of protest; white ribbons with a knot on the trees as a symbol of the LGBTQ+ community - white ribbons on the hands as a symbol of the protest movement in Minsk; Myth about mandrake, which grows from a male semen - Belarusian mythology is associated with the semiotics of potatoes.

The two-channel installation does not so much compare or contrast contexts, but rather demonstrates a tireless thirst for life and the struggle for freedom against the backdrop of urban park landscapes.

Valentina Petrova
Small Tree with a Large One on the Background, 2020
photo, geolocation, performative sculpture, text

For her installation, Valentina Petrova chooses the territory of the Oleshkiv Sands Reserve in the Kherson region. The object-performative form of the work does not provide the possibility for a full-fledged process documentation, so the artist records her subjective experience in text, which is included in the exhibition as an audio file. Other media that indirectly point to the work are photos of the desert landscape and geographical coordinates.

Valentina explores the history of the place, in addition, pays attention to the study of the etymology of the word landscape. The centuries-old process of forming the sand massif of the desert was due to natural, political and economic factors. The area has become one of the largest deserts in Europe, either due to changes in climatic conditions or due to agricultural activities. However, in recent years, military exercises and ammunition testing were resumed at the nature park, in connection with the Russian aggression and the occupation of the Crimean peninsula, which also makes adjustments to the landscape.

All this becomes a basis for reflection on the possibility of their own entry into the space-time relationship with the place. The artist creates sculptural objects: military shells and steppe plants, all from sand. Once created, sand shells, like their metal prototypes, fall back into the sand. Vegetation is placed on top.

With her artistic gesture, Valentina suggests thinking of a landscape as of a process. In particular, the process involves the transformation of sand into sand objects, objects back into sand. The temporality of this transformation enters into a dialogue with the cyclical transformation of the desert landscape and the factors that influence this course.

Supported by CEC ArtsLink and Open Place.

Daryna Mamaisur
A Steppe With Rabbits and Pheasants Running Around, and Where Some Even Saw Foxes, 2020
video, 10'

The title of the work quotes one of the Google Maps reviews about industrial enterprises in Ukraine. In 2018, Volodymyr Zhdanov wrote: ‘Azovstal is gradually turning into a steppe, where hares and pheasants run, and some have even seen foxes.’

The first part of the project, published on creatingruin.net, reflects on the oppositions built around the perception of land in the industrialized region. It is an attempt to trace how, in the vortex of social and economic change, the landscape stood out and acquired subjectivity; how official rhetoric, where land was evaluated in terms of industrial ‘efficiency’, became part of everyday language.

In the second part, the author continues to work with this topic. However, in this work Darina takes a ‘step back’ and focuses on the pre-industrial landscape and the landscape in transition. For many witnesses of industrialization beginning in the late XIX - early XX century, the pristine steppe was the subject of a loss. Today, the narrative of loss is more associated with declining industry.

The video is an attempt to fantasize about the course of history, which leaves its mark on the landscape - to imagine a utopian scenario in which the steppe returns to its lands. But to reflect on the lost, looking back at us - accompanying at every moment of time.

Video: Daryna Mamaisur, Artur Mloyan

Editing: Daryna Mamaisur

Sound: Anna Hvyl

Special thanks to the staff of the Stone Graves Reserve, Artur Mloyan, Sasha Protyaga, Oleksandr Telyuk

The video uses excerpts from the film ‘Pearl of the Steppe’ (1931), which is stored in the Central State CinePhotoPhono Archives of Ukraine named after H. Pshenychny.

Nikolay Karabinovych
Can You Hear the Ashes Ringing?, 2020
photo, text

Nikolai Karabinovich in his practice consistently explores the collective memory, historical paradoxes and phenomena of place and time. In his new work, ‘Can you hear the ashes ringing?’, Karabinovych addresses the story of the 1966 landfill explosion in the town of Myrnograd in the Donetsk region. A mass of hot rock from a slagheap of №5-6 coal mines slipped on a nearby residential street, burying houses with people inside. The event, which eyewitnesses compare to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, occurred due to a chemical reaction in a mass of rocks, which caused a significant rise in temperature and led to tragedy.

Egor Antsygin
Special Thanks, 2020
video, 5'

In his work, Egor Antsygin comments on the artist's position in the system of contemporary art. He refers to his own experience of participating in the Landscape As a Monument A-I-R, which took place online due to quarantine restrictions. Feeling the limited opportunities for communication and cooperation in the virtual network between group members, the artist appeals to the residency programs potential, that offer physical space for the formation of new relationships and opportunities for interaction. Precisely because the context of a certain place plays a decisive role in the realization of the idea, Yegor goes to Lysychansk, a city in Luhansk region, to make an artistic gesture. Acquaintance with the community, casual and planned meetings and flaneuring become an intangible part of the work, and in the video, which is presented in the exhibition, the author expresses gratitude to the institutions and people who contributed to this experience.

The almost static image of the artist's performance video, which took place on the hill of the old slagheap overlooking the city, is compensated by the dynamics of the narrative, which unfolds in the captions to the work. The ironic name and form of expression actualizes the need for a physical stay in a certain landscape and the value of shared experience. Both aspects, while remaining key to artistic practice, face the challenges of the quarantine period.