‘The School of Kyiv‘. The Biennale 2015 in Kyiv will take place despite the withdrawal of Mystetsky Arsenal

Mysteskyi Arsenal has unilaterally withdrawn as an organiser of the 2nd Kyiv Biennale, under the title ‘The School of Kyiv‘. This decision was taken without any warning and unexpectedly interrupts a project that involves artists, intellectuals, civil society initiatives and institutions in Ukraine, Europe and beyond. These groups and individuals dedicated their work to an initiative trying to create a space of reflection beyond the logics of the actual conflicts.

Under present political conditions in Ukraine, after the revolution of Maidan and when the country is at war, the political potential of art is needed today more than ever before. The fundamental role of art as a reflexive instrument is to challenge the present political context defined by the armed conflict in Ukraine.

The biennale is an open project, which society has a deep need for, aimed at creating a public framework, a space where civil society will be able to reflect on its threatened conditions by means of art and knowledge.

We, together with institutions and initiatives in Kyiv, the Ukraine and Europe, have decided to go ahead with the biennale project, after one and a half years of intense collaboration and exchange, without the support of Mysteskyi Arsenal. ‘The School of Kyiv‘ will take place this year as planned!

The project will be realised by the curators in close collaboration with a wide range of artistic and civil society organizations.

Hedwig Saxenhuber & Georg Schöllhammer
Curators

More information will be given at a press conference and in a press release in April in Kyiv

Tuesday, 24 March 2015, 19:00
Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street (1st floor), Kyiv)

Visual Culture Research Center, Political Critique, and Docudays UA invite you to the discussion «Does Propaganda Really Exist?», which will take place on Tuesday, 24 March, at 19:00.

The concept of «propaganda» is mentioned in legal system, media, public and political discourses. Counterpropaganda – political struggle in media field – became the mission of state apparatus, as well as civil society. However, the content of the term «propaganda» is still opaque, its usage is, to a large extent, intuitive and based on the concealed ideological and political preferences, or prejudices.

Such blur implicates the distrust of facts, of any records, or evidence, and finally, – the blurring of reality in general.

What can documentary filmmaking counterpose in this situation? On the one hand, it is always accompanied by the pathos of truth. On the other hand, this is exactly what makes it an ideal instrument, a medium of propaganda.

The purpose of the discussion is problematization of the concept of propaganda in contemporary context. Is non-propagandist depiction of war possible in documentary? Are there any boundaries between propaganda and engaged attitude, between propagandist and antagonist?

Participants of the discussion:

Olga Bryukhovetska (PhD in Philosophy) is a Professor at the Cultural Studies Department (National University of «Kyiv-Mohyla Academy»), culture and film theorist. She teaches the courses «Visual Culture», «Theory of Communication», and «Mass Culture».

Mustafa Nayyem is a member of Ukrainian parliament, former journalist, co-founder and editor of Hromadske.tv, former author for the newspapers Kommersant and Ukrainska Pravda, activist of Stop Censorship! movement.

Svetla Turnin (Canada) is a film and culture theorist, co-founder and Executive Director of Cinema Politica. In 2013 she co-edited the book Screening Truth to Power: A Reader on Documentary Activism. Most recently Svetla has been giving workshops and talks on the politics of festival programming, documentary and activism at international festivals and conferences.

Yevhen Fedchenko (PhD in Political Science) is a Professor and Director of the School of Journalism (National University of «Kyiv-Mohyla Academy»), international journalist, co-founder of Stopfake.org. He organized trainings on reporter skills, television news production, documentary production for international NGOs (OSCE, DFID, PRESS NOW).

Pavel Sheremet is Belorussian, Russian, and Ukrainian journalist, author of documentaries Wild Hunting and Wild Hunting – 2, Chechen Diary, 1991 – the Last Year of the Empire, Execution of Saddam. War without Winner etc. He is a Laureate of the OSCE Prize for Journalism and Democracy.

Moderator – Vasyl Cherepanyn

The discussion will take place within the frameworks of International Documentary Human Rights Film Festival Docudays UA.

Admission is free

Supported by ERSTE Stiftung and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation

Media partners:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) was founded in 2008 as a platform for collaboration between academic, artistic, and activist communities. VCRC is an independent initiative, which is engaged in publishing and artistic activities, scientific research, organization of public lectures, discussions, and conferences. In 2015 Visual Culture Research Center received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award.

Contacts:

+380631481204 (Nazariy Sovsun)
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Wednesday, 18 March 2015, 19:00
Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street (1st floor), Kyiv)

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the presentation of gender studies anthology Image, Body, Order, which will take place on Wednesday, 18 March, at 19:00.

Why do we discuss gender? Actually, why do we still discuss it? Why are we still confronted by latent, or explicit, rejection of this concept and, generally, topics related to gender?

The anthology Image, Body, Order, issued by MEDUSA publishing house, is an attempt to answer these questions, being at the same time evidence of their paradoxical nature. On the one hand, serious gender studies have existed and significantly influenced the contemporary humanities for decades. On the other hand, the concept of gender in the public debate on society, science, and art is still often perceived with mistrust.

Image, Body, Order is an anthology of academic texts on gender issues in different areas of knowledge: economics, medical science, architecture, law, literature, photography etc. The main purpose of the publication is to introduce to Ukrainian readers new, as yet untranslated research works, particularly those from German-speaking part of gender studies, which to this day remain insufficiently represented in the Ukrainian academic context. The materials present wide thematic range: from feminist jurisprudence, to intersexuality, eating disorders, and the gender aspects of architecture.

The anthology will be presented by the editor Kateryna Mishchenko, translators Olesya Bondarenko and Lesya Kulchynska, and researcher Mariya Mayerchyk.

Olesya Bondarenko is a scholar of literature, translator, researcher of contemporary American poetry at Kyiv National Linguistic University.

Mariya Mayerchyk (PhD in History) is an ethnologist, who specializes in cultural anthropology, history of culture, gender and queer issues. She is the author of the book Body and Ritual. Structuralist and Semantic Analysis of Family Ceremonies in Ukraine.

Kateryna Mishchenko is a translator and essayist, co-founder of MEDUSA publishing house.

Lesya Kulchynska is a theorist of culture, member of Visual Culture Research Center.

Admission is free

The lecture will take place within the frameworks of feminist program that is taking place at VCRC from 3d to 19th of March

Organization partner – MEDUSA publishing house

Supported by ERSTE Stiftung, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Ukraine

Media partner:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) was founded in 2008 as a platform for collaboration between academic, artistic, and activist communities. VCRC is an independent initiative, which is engaged in publishing and artistic activities, scientific research, organization of public lectures, discussions, and conferences. In 2015 Visual Culture Research Center received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award.

Contacts:

+380631481204 (Nazariy Sovsun)
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Thursday, 12 March 2015, 19:00
Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street (1st floor), Kyiv)

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the discussion Women, Parties, Quotas: How to Achieve Gender Equality in Politics?, which will take place on Thursday, 12 March, at 19:00.

In 2015 all Ukrainian authorities had to include not less than 30 % of women. At least these were the liabilities, which Ukraine pledged before the UN. However, currently nearly 90 % of members of our parliament are men. Ukrainian President and some political experts motivate the increase of women in politics for the reason that it will help to «achieve peace, wisdom», to «fight corruption». It seems that our officials lack political will, have no idea about the mechanisms of implementation of such reforms, and even don’t understand the very idea of gender equality, needed for the guarantee of the real access of women to politics and power.

This discussion aims to clarify the purposes for gender equality in governmental bodies, consider the mechanisms of «positive discrimination», implementation of gender quotas, and changes in the election law, and to highlight the relevant experience of reforms in the world.

Participants:

Tamara Martsenyuk is a Doctor of Sociology, Professor at the Sociology Department (National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy), who teaches the course Gender and Politics.

Olena Yena is a Senior Manager of Women – leaders program (National Democratic Institute).

Zakhar Popovych is a Doctor of Economics, activist of Left Opposition socialist union, co-author of a draft statute of the party of social revolution, which involves extensive use of gender quotas.

Moderator – Olha Vesnyanka

Admission is free

The discussion will take place within the frameworks of feminist program which will last at VCRC from the 3d until the 19th of March

Supported by ERSTE Stiftung, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Ukraine

Media partner:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) was founded in 2008 as a platform for collaboration between academic, artistic, and activist communities. VCRC is an independent initiative, which is engaged in publishing and artistic activities, scientific research, organization of public lectures, discussions, and conferences. In 2015 Visual Culture Research Center received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award.

Contacts:

+380631481204 (Nazariy Sovsun)
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Wednesday, 4 March 2015, 19:00
Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street (1st floor), Kyiv)

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the presentation of Ukrainian translation of a book Reflexive Sociology with participation of Anastasia Riabchuk and Yaroslav Hrytsak, which will take place on Wednesday, 4 March, at 19:00.

Reflexive Sociology is the first Ukrainian introduction to the scientific contribution of the most outstanding French sociologist of the 20th century Pierre Bourdieu (1930 – 2002). The book is based on a seminar held at the University of Chicago with the purpose of familiarization of the American public with theoretical and methodological principles of his research. In a dialogue with his student and colleague Loic Wacquant Bourdieu explains the meaning of his key concepts, responds to criticism, and draws special attention to the importance of reflexivity and inclusion of the theory of intellectual practice into wider social theory.

Analyzing his scientific methodology, Bourdieu makes a set of conclusions about political and emancipatory potential of social sciences and its confines, role of intellectuals in the reproduction of symbolic violence and instruments of struggle against it, reflects on the problem of determinacy of “free choice” and possibilities of the extension of freedom.

The book will be presented by its translator Anastasia Riabchuk and historian Yaroslav Hrytsak.

Anastasia Riabchuk is a sociologist and teacher at the Department of Sociology (Kyiv-Mohyla Academy). She is also a fellow researcher at the Department of Social Change (University of Johannesburg).

Yaroslav Hrytsak is a historian and publicist, Professor of History (Ukrainian Catholic University), Senior Editor of Ukraina Moderna journal.

Moderator – Lesia Kulchynska

Admission is free

Organization partner – MEDUSA Publishing House

Supported by ERSTE Foundation and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation

Media partner:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) was founded in 2008 as a platform for collaboration between academic, artistic, and activist communities. VCRC is an independent initiative, which is engaged in publishing and artistic activities, scientific research, organization of public lectures, discussions, and conferences. In 2015 Visual Culture Research Center was awarded the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award.

Contacts:

+38096 4929600 (Nataliya Neshevets)
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Sunday, December 21st, 18:00
Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street, Kyiv)

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the lecture by Ekaterina Degot, which will take place on Sunday, December 21st, at 18:00.

In summer 2014 curator and essayist Ekaterina Degot criticized system of contemporary art, which has served as shelter for critical thinking for a long time. According to Degot, association between contemporary art and critical thinking has crashed. This year’s MANIFESTA, which was held in Russia in the midst of Russian military aggression in Ukraine, is one of the symptoms of this collapse. In her lecture Ekaterina Degot will speak about the influence of oligarchic and state structures on the system of contemporary art. Proceeding from the question “what went wrong in the 1990s?”, she will analyze the influence of imperial thinking on contemporary Russian art.

Ekaterina Degot is a curator, essayist, and art historian. She is also an Artistic Director of The Academy of the Arts of the World (Cologne). Among her books: Terrorist Naturalism and Russian Art of the 20th Century. In 2013 she was a curator of the first Bergen Triennale. In 2014 she received Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory.

Further readings:

Ekaterina Degot. A Text That Should Never Have Been Written?

Ekaterina Degot. The List of Failures.Speech at Igor Zabel Award Ceremony.

Admission is free

The event will take place within the framework of “Between Revolution and War” project supported by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

Supported by ERSTE Foundation and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation

Media partner:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) is a platform for collaboration of artists, activists and academics founded in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2008. Since its inception VCRC had organized over 100 debates, conferences and research seminars, nearly 20 exhibitions and a series of street protest actions.

Contacts:

+38097 436 98 99 (Yustyna Kravchuk)
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Friday, December 19th, 19:00
Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street, Kyiv)

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the lecture by an American historian Marci Shore, which will take place on Friday, December 19th, 19:00.

In her lecture Marci Shore will return to some of the metaphysical questions about subjectivity and responsibility once posed by East European dissidents in an attempt to illuminate some of the more essential questions revealed by a wrenching past. This lecture will explore the disenchantment with post-communism, the afterlife of totalitarianism, and the dilemmas of subjectivity—for Marx, for Havel’s greengrocer and Poland’s Solidarność, and on the Maidan.

Marci Shore: “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism,” Marx and Engels wrote in 1848. Over a century and a half later, communism is no less haunting as a specter from the past. For many years the communist archives played the role of the Freudian unconscious: that dark psychic closet into which everything too disturbing for the conscious mind was thrown. The process of “accounting with the past” as an attempt above all to distinguish guilt from innocence has often blinded us to the deeper and more essential questions revealed by that past.

Marci Shore is a Professor of History at Yale University. She teaches European cultural and intellectual history. She is the author of the books The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe and Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968. Currently she is at work on a book project titled “Phenomenological Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe”, in which she will explore phenomenological aspects of Maidan protest.

The lecture will be held in English

Admission is free

Supported by ERSTE Foundation

Media partner:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) is a platform for collaboration of artists, activists and academics founded in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2008. Since its inception VCRC had organized over 100 debates, conferences and research seminars, nearly 20 exhibitions and a series of street protest actions.

Contacts:

+38097 436 98 99 (Yustyna Kravchuk)
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Sunday, December 14th, 18:00
Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street (1st floor), Kyiv)

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to visit the lecture by Pyotr Pavlensky, which will take place on Sunday, December 14th, at 18:00.

Over the last few years performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky became one of the most outstanding representatives of Russian radical art, which fulfills the function of uncompromising critique of the regime, while political opposition in Russia is missing. Such public artistic actions by Pyotr Pavlensky, as Carcass, Fixation, Liberty, and Separation have shocked Russian society and questioned its ability to resist the authorities. In his lecture, Pyotr Pavlensky will speak about the artistic strategies of finding a way out in a political dead end. How to ruin the decorative superstructure, which conceals the violence of the state apparatus, with its own hands? How to use the instruments of the regime against itself?

Pyotr Pavlensky is a Russian performance artist, author of radical actions in the public space. Editor of Political Propaganda magazine and publishing house of the same name. Lives and works in Saint-Petersburg.

Admission is free

The event will take place within the framework of “Between Revolution and War” project supported by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

Supported by ERSTE Foundation and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation

Media partner:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) is a platform for collaboration of artists, activists and academics founded in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2008. Since its inception VCRC had organized over 100 debates, conferences and research seminars, nearly 20 exhibitions and a series of street protest actions.

Contacts:

+38097 436 98 99 (Yustyna Kravchuk)
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Tuesday, December 9th, 2014, 19:00
Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street (1st floor), Kyiv)

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the lecture by an American philosopher and cultural historian Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, which will take place on Tuesday, December 9th, 2014, at 19:00.

The past few years have produced an increased number of events and situations suggesting that we may have arrived at a “vanishing point of history” and, therefore, at an “end of politics.” Instead of repeating the familiar argumentative turn of denying the value of such impressions and of their radical interpretation, this lecture will try to confirm and to explain the ends of history and of politics in our present, based on a historicization of the concept of “history”. It will thus arrive at a description of the present that offers fresh analytic perspectives and perhaps even some starting points for post-historical and post-political solutions of problems that we have been obsessed with for a long time.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht – American philosopher, cultural historian, and literary theoretician, Professor at Stanford University. He is famous for his books In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, and numerous texts on western philosophical tradition and history of humanities. In addition, he studies media and mass culture, aesthetics and epistemology of every-day life, histories of European literatures. His book In Praise of Athletic Beauty was published in Ukrainian.

The lecture will be held in English

Admission is free

The event will take place within the framework of “Between Revolution and War” project supported by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

Supported by ERSTE Foundation and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation

Media partner:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) is a platform for collaboration of artists, activists and academics founded in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2008. Since its inception VCRC had organized over 100 debates, conferences and research seminars, nearly 20 exhibitions and a series of street protest actions.

Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street, Kyiv)

Contacts:

+38097 436 98 99 (Yustyna Kravchuk)
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

December 4th – 17th, 2014

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the series of discussions and screenings “Between Revolution and War”, which will take place from the 4th until the 16th of December, 2014.

During the situation of war conflict, when radical attitudes and hostility grow within the society and the degree of hate speech increases, there is a need for critical thinking and de-ideologized perspective on the reality. The project focuses on the functioning of public institutions in the revolutionary situation, in the conditions of war and occupation, as well as on the connections between symbolic and real violence and its influence on political processes in Ukrainian society after Maidan. Through the implementation of discursive, visual and media instruments the project opposes to the rhetoric of violence and seeks for the strategies of inclusion of emancipatory potential of Maidan into the structural changes of Ukrainian society.

December 4th, 19:00 – Island Crimea

December 5th, 19:00 – Displaced Individuals: War and Internal Migration

December 7th, 17:00 – ATOpia

December 11th, 19:00 – Biopolitics of War: Captivity, Tortures, Lynch Law

December 12th, 19:00 – Nataliya Gumenyuk. “Life after DPR”. Screening and discussion

December 13th, 17:00 – State of Emergency and New Violence in Ukraine

December 16th, 19:00 – PMR (Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic)

December 17th, 19:00 – Between Revolution and War

Admission is free

Events will take place within the framework of “Mutual Understanding” program supported by Ministry of Culture of Ukraine and State Agency for Promotion of Culture of Ukraine

Supported by ERSTE Foundation

Media partner:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) is a platform for collaboration of artists, activists and academics founded in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2008. Since its inception VCRC had organized over 100 debates, conferences and research seminars, nearly 20 exhibitions and a series of street protest actions.

Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street, Kyiv)

Contacts:

+38097 436 98 99 (Yustyna Kravchuk)
https://www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua