Mykola Ridnyi SHELTER
25 April – 14 May 2014
Visual Culture Research Center invites to the opening of Shelter exhibition by Mykola Ridnyi, which will take place on Friday, 25th of April at 19:00
in Kyiv, Petrivska Str. 34.
For the last few weeks bomb shelter location plans have appeared on the announcement boards of government institutions in Kyiv. What seemed to be almost an archeological layer of city architecture has suddenly regained its relevance. The menace of the state of exception, the fear of war, the feeling of uncontrollability of (geo)political processes have turned the city out of the space of possibilities and public interaction into a network of potential refuges. Collective enthusiasm of Maidan now gives way to the search of private safety enclaves and individual retreat.
Through the urban phenomenon of shelter – from bomb shelters and Cold War period bunkers to improvised refuges induced by fear of economic and political cataclysm, Mykola Ridnyi looks into the place and the fate of an individual at the crossroads of global processes. Political and social imaginary of today’s man, collective fears and phobias, but also individual inventiveness in solving systemic problems, are in the zone of artistic research by Ridnyi.
The exhibition is part of Visual Culture Research Center project Unrendered Spaces and is supported by ERSTE Foundation.
Opening hours: 26 April – 14 May, Tuesday to Sunday, 12:00 – 19:00.
Address: Kyiv, Petrivska Str., 34.
Mykola Ridnyi was born in 1985 in Kharkiv, where he currently lives and works. Graduated from Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts. Since 2005 cofounder and curator of SOSka gallery and laboratory, a space organized by artists for developing the cultural milieu in Kharkiv.
Through video, sculpture and installation Mykola Ridnyi carries out his critical reflection on the social and political context of post-Soviet space. His artistic messages are often developed from combining documentary films with traditional figurative sculpture or found objects.
Unrendered Spaces is a series of exhibitions dedicated to the strategies of perception of the urban and non-urban environment, the possibilities of its exploration by the means of art. Focused on the points of perceptive multiplicity of interpreting the living space, the project aims to play out the political, social and aesthetic zones of tension in its redefinition.
Visual Culture Research Center was founded in 2008 in order to create an interdisciplinary environment for the analysis of Ukraine’s post-Soviet condition in terms of art, knowledge and politics. Since then, VCRC has organized over 150 research and discussion events engaging Ukrainian and foreign scholars, and about 20 art exhibitions.