Tuesday, 8 March 2016, 18:30
DOCUMENTARY PERFORMANCE
IT PISSES ME OFF

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the documentary performance It Pisses Me Off by Mariam Agamyan, which will take place on Tuesday, March 8, at 18:30 at Plivka cultural space.

The 8th of March, International Day for Women’s Emancipation, is a great opportunity to articulate what pisses us off. Do we want to say it? It is something that remains untold on the everyday level, something that is not an issue for the media news. This project exists so that “it pisses me off” could be heard.

The organizers of the event invite everybody to share their reflections in the context of women’s fight for their rights and read out a text within the framework of the performance. For this purpose you need to send authorial or anonymous text to text.menya.besit@gmail.com up to and including March 7.

Readings will be followed by a discussion.

It Pisses Me Off documentary performance is taking place for the fourth time. The first reading was performed at Ukrainian Cosmos exhibition, the next two took place within The School of the Lonesome during The School of Kyiv – Kyiv Biennial 2015. Every time the readings involve new participants and texts. The project is not exclusively a scenic practice – everyone who’s willing can participate. It Pisses Me Off is not about hating – the project is a space for articulation of personal and collective concerns.

Admission is free

The performance will be followed by a feminist concert-party The F Sounds: https://www.facebook.com/events/1014879751933149/

Address:
1, Vasylkivska Street (Holosiivska metro station)
Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre,
2 floor, Plivka cultural space

Supported by Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Kyiv

Supported by ERSTE Stiftung and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation:

Partners: Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre,
Plivka cultural space

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, artistic activities, research, organization of public lectures, discussions, and conferences. In 2015 Visual Culture Research Center received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award. Visual Culture Research Center was also an organizer of The School of Kyiv – Kyiv Biennial 2015.

Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street, 1 floor)

Contacts:

+380676695457 Ganna Tsyba
+380639535143 Natalka Neshevets
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

February 26 – March 27, 2016
Exhibition by Melnychuk-Burlaka Group
BETTER, WORSE, EVEN WORSE

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the Better, Worse, Even Worse exhibition by Melnychuk-Burlaka Group, which will open on February 26, at 19:00 and will last until March 27.

In Better, Worse, Even Worse project Ivan Melnychuk and Oleksandr Burlaka use key notions from architecture and urban studies for the interpretation of current political and military affairs. For example, how could it happen that in a political vocabulary the notion of “bridge” started referring to “friendship”, “unity”, “agreement”? After all, from the perspective of architectural history, bridge is, above all, a military tool serving for the expansion to new territories and establishment of effective control over them. The starting point for the project is a current propagandist project of constructing a bridge over Kerch Strait, which has to link occupied Crimea with Russian Federation.

The project is based on a work made for the exhibition Phone Calls from the Cemetery and Other Stories: An Exhibition Against the Covert War in Ukraine at the Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne (curators – Ekaterina Degot and David Riff).

“The idea of linking two points on the straight line is the realization of mathematical abstraction. The main function of the bridge has been the same – to give war prisoners a work. The following promise of economic miracle is driven by the imitation of a sacrifice. Contemporary super bridges are enormous altars over the sea of blood.”

“The bridge over our heads links Russia with Europe. It is the bridge between two “welfares”. Countries in between are understood by Europe and Russia as dressings supplementing main course.”

Melnychuk-Burlaka Group

The exhibition is open daily from 13:00 to 20:00, Monday – closed.
Admission is free

Melnychuk-Burlaka Group was founded in 2013 (earlier Ivan Melnychuk and Oleksandr Burlaka were members of the Group of Objects). In their practice they question the role, ideology, and responsibility of an architect today. Melnychuk-Burlaka Group participated in the First Bergen Triennial (Bergen Assembly), in the exhibitions of PinchukArtCentre Art Prize nominees in 2013 and 2015, in the exhibition Phone Calls from the Cemetery and Other Stories at the Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne etc. In 2014 the Island exhibition by Melnychuk-Burlaka Group took place at Visual Culture Research Center.

Oleksandr Burlaka is an architect and artist based in Kyiv, Ukraine. He is a Junior Research Fellow at the National Art Museum of Ukraine.

Ivan Melnychuk is an architect and artist based in Kyiv, Ukraine. He is a co-founder of Method foundation.

Supported by ERSTE Stiftung та Charles Stewart Mott Foundation:

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, artistic activities, research, organization of public lectures, discussions, and conferences. In 2015 Visual Culture Research Center received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award. Visual Culture Research Center was also an organizer of The School of Kyiv – Kyiv Biennial 2015.

Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street, 1 floor)

Contacts:

+380676695457 Ganna Tsyba
+380639535143 Natalka Neshevets
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Friday, 19 February 2016, 19:00
Film screening
WAR IN KYIV

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the premiere screening of a collective film War in Kyiv, created during Kyiv Biennial 2015 within the framework of The School of Image and Evidence.

War in Kyiv is an experimental film shot during Artur Żmijewski’s workshop that took place at The School of Kyiv biennial in September 2015. The workshop was held in the form of a ‚conversation‘ between the participants that proceeded through short video statements. Every video created within the workshop was either an individual sentence, or a respond to other participant’s sentence. War in Kyiv is a collection of such statements, combined into a collective talk.

Co-authors of War in Kyiv: Vitaliy Atanasov, Angelina Kariakina, Ksenia Marchenko, Diana Poladova, Oleksiy Radynski, Ivanna Yakovyna, Artur Żmijewski.

A discussion moderated by Kateryna Sergatskova with participation of film co-authors will take place after the screening.

Artur Żmijewski is a filmmaker, artist, artistic editor of Political Critique project. He curated the 7th Berlin Biennial in 2012. In 2005 he represented Poland at Venice Biennial. His solo exhibition Democracies took place at Visual Culture Research Center in 2012.

Admission is free

Supported by ERSTE Stiftung та Charles Stewart Mott Foundation:

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, artistic activities, research, organization of public lectures, discussions, and conferences. In 2015 Visual Culture Research Center received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award. Visual Culture Research Center was also an organizer of The School of Kyiv – Kyiv Biennial 2015.

Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street, 1 floor)

Contacts:

+380676695457 Ganna Tsyba
+380639535143 Natalka Neshevets
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Wednesday, 17 February 2016, 19:00
Lecture by Lesia Kulchynska
The Violence of the Image

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the lecture by Lesia Kulchynska, that will take place on Wednesday, 17 February, at 19:00.

The most terrifying thing about horror films is that the horror haunts us even after the end of the movie. Why does screen, that separates us from the horrible, appears to be penetrable for fear? Why do we feel helpless before the image, even if we are physically safe? In order to protect ourselves, we have to close our eyes. But even this does not always help. Some images are so dangerous that they have to be destroyed. Why do people fight with images? How can “just an image” be threatening? What exactly is under threat? Is fear of the image an attribute of naïve consciousness, or is there actually something to be afraid of?

Lesia Kulchynska, PhD, is a curator, cultural and film theorist at Visual Culture Research Center.

The lecture will open a new season at Visual Culture Research Center, which is a conceptual continuation of ideas, practices and projects, initiated by The School of Kyiv – Kyiv Biennial 2015.

Admission is free

Photo: Olivia Steele. Nothing Is What It Seems, 2014.

Supported by ERSTE Stiftung та Charles Stewart Mott Foundation:

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, artistic activities, research, organization of public lectures, discussions, and conferences. In 2015 Visual Culture Research Center received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award. Visual Culture Research Center was also an organizer of The School of Kyiv – Kyiv Biennial 2015.

Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street, 1 floor)

Contacts:

+380676695457 Ganna Tsyba
+380639535143 Natalka Neshevets
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Thursday, 17 December 2015, 19:00

Ethnography of Police Intrusion Practices in High Security Areas (“Sensitive” Neighborhoods) in France

Lecture by Jérémie Gauthier is based on a long term ethnographic inquiry of public security actors (police, municipality, judicial bodies) in one big French city. It strives to reconceptualize the relationship between police actions and political power. The lecturer will present strategies, chosen by the police in accordance with requirements of central authorities, through the example of the so-called Top-Priority Security Zones Reform, which is being implemented in France since 2012, and is aimed at “territorialization” of police activities by concentrating their forces in so-called sensitive areas. He will also analyze the division of power between different institutions involved in implementation of local security policies, as well as impact such reforms have on the relationship between police and residents of these “sensitive” neighborhoods.

Jérémie Gauthier is a sociologist who works at the Institute for the Interdisciplinary Research of Social Problems (IRIS-EHESS) in Paris and in Marc Bloch Franco-German Research Centre for the Social Sciences in Berlin. His research is mainly focused on the questions of police activities in France and Germany: the relationship between police and minorities, discrimination and racism on the part of police, gender dimension in the work of police, social security reform, as well as correlations of police’s rights and actions. Lately, Jérémie Gauthier has been working on the research of state policy implementation methods on the local level in France and Germany.

The lecture will take place within The School of the Displaced of The School of Kyiv – Kyiv Biennial 2015 and the frameworks of Migrations, Identities, Territories program, which is developed by the French Institute in Ukraine and presents French experience in migration research from historical, sociological, and demographical perspectives.

Working language – French, with consecutive interpretation into Ukrainian
Admission is free

Supported by ERSTE Stiftung and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation

Organization partner:

Contacts:

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

November 19, Thursday

19:00
Opening of “What in Me Is Feminine?” Exhibition

November 20, Friday

19:00
Zuzanna Janin. In Between. About the Moment and Memory.
The artist will talk about the main topics of her works such as fragility of a human and his or her conditions of existence, memory, space, and time. She will show her video In Between (2006).

20:00
Anka Lesniak. Visible and inVisible. Feminist Art in Public Space.
The artist will show photo and video documentations of her projects that are aimed at the specificity of a site, where they take place.

Working language – English

November 21, Saturday

17:00
Alicja Zebrowska. Psycho-Penetration
The artist will focus on her artistic fascination with a human soul (psyche) and experiments with interactions between people. She will show her videos Insides, Desinfection of feelings, Infiltron, Regression, Monitoring.

18:00
Anna Baumgart. How the Trained Girls Make Love Movies
A human as a political animal is a human that has a voice to avoid invisibility. The artist will show her films: Ecstatic, Hysterical and Other Saintly Ladies, Supplement to the Piece on Mother and Motherland, and The Cranes Are Flying.

19:00
Aleka Polis. Сyclooxytocin
The artist will show the work Oxytocin # 44 about her gift for Ukraine during Maidan and also videos Muslim Rosary, After three days I will have four holes, Hylogenia.

Working language – Polish with translation

November 22, Sunday

16:00
Oksana Briukhovetska. A curator-led tour of «What in me is feminine?» exhibition

November 29, Sunday

17:00
Iwona Demko. A Forgotten Vagina Cult
The artist will give a lecture about the divine and sacred status of vagina in pre-patriarchy because of its ability to give life, and how later the vagina has been fraught with guilt and shame.

Working language – Polish with translation

December 5, Saturday

17:00
Alina Yakubenko. How It Used to Be, video (2015)
The video is comprised of anonymous interviews in which artists talk about reluctant work to earn money and the hidden side of the artists’ labor market, which generates a product called “hackwork” (“khaltura”).

December 18, Friday

19:00
Discussion Sex Work: to Allow or to Ban
The public discussion is aimed to debunk popular myths about sex work by the up-to-date research in social sciences. The reasons that motivate women to become sex workers and existing practices to regulate sex work will be at the focus of the discussion.

Participants of the discussion:
Natalia Isaieva, a spokeswoman for Legalife-Ukraine charity organization
Olena Zuckerman, an executive director of Legalife-Ukraine charity organization
Anna Dovgopol, a feminist
Moderated by Dafna Rachok.

December 21, Monday

19:00
Oksana Briukhovetska. A curator-led tour of «What in me is feminine?» exhibition

Closing of the exhibition

Supported by ERSTE Stiftung and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation

Project cofinanced by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland

Organization partners: Krytyka Polityczna and Polish Institute in Kyiv

Media partner:

Contacts:

www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Tetiana Mala
093 168 38 62
mala.socio@gmail.com

Anna Orekhova
050 918 65 37
a.orekhova@gmail.com

The Polish-Ukrainian exhibition of feminist art, dedicated to the topic of “femininity” in the society, will be held at the Visual Culture Research Center (Kyiv, 44 Hlybochytska Str., 1st floor) from November 19 to December 21.

The exhibition is open daily from 12:00 to 20:00
Day off – Monday

Today we live in a world, where realization of political demand for equality of sexes has become possible despite real or imaginary differences between them. This implies a need for comprehensive reflection on cases of discrimination, as well as an analysis of “masculine” and “feminine” constructs. When talking about the “female”, it is important to give a voice to women themselves.

The exhibition is aimed at presenting art works, through which women artists speak about the existence of women in history and at present, gender roles, as well as about women’s corporality, practices, and rituals of life.

In Poland, feminist topics have been raised in art as early as the 1970s and then had a significant surge in the 1990s. The Polish women artists thoroughly elaborate on the topic of female corporality and subjectivity. One of the landmark works of Polish feminists of the 1990s will be shown at the exhibition among the works of the last decade. The Ukrainian part of the exhibition will feature the latest works of the women artists who explore different aspects of the “feminine” and also demonstrate a poignant response to the current condition of the Ukrainian society. Gender issues in their works permeate the questions of identity, history, love, and war.

Curator
Oksana Briukhovetska

Artists
Poland: Anna Baumgart, Iwona Demko, Zuzanna Janin, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Urszula Kluz-Knopek, Anka Lesniak, Aleka Polis, Alicja Zebrowska.

Ukraine: Oksana Briukhovetska, Ksenia Gnylytska, Grycja Erde, Alina Yakubenko, Alina Kleitman, Alina Kopytsia. Iryna Kudria, Maria Kulykivska, Valentyna Petrova.

Admission is free

Supported by ERSTE Stiftung and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation

Project cofinanced by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland

Organization partners: Krytyka Polityczna and Polish Institute in Kyiv

Media partner:

Contacts:

www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Tetiana Mala
093 168 38 62
mala.socio@gmail.com

Anna Orekhova
050 918 65 37
a.orekhova@gmail.com

The School of Kyiv – Kyiv Biennial 2015 presents a new format of an art biennial integrating exhibitions and arenas of public reflection. Works of more than 100 international and Ukrainian artists will be shown in an open display structure, including six Schools, where artists and intellectuals from around the world will meet and work with the public in collaborative forums. Departing from the current situation in Ukraine, the “The School of Kyiv” will be addressing burning issues relevant for the citizens of Ukraine, Europe and beyond as well as imagining egalitarian and alternative futures; and the counter-propositions of art.

The School of Kyiv is an independent project curated by Hedwig Saxenhuber and Georg Schöllhammer, and conceived and organized together with the Visual Culture Research Center (Kyiv).

Departments of “The School of Kyiv” will open in a series of institutions across Europe as an integral part of the project.

Friday, 3 July 2015, 19:00

Opening of Motherhood exhibition at Lviv Art Palace

Visual Culture Research Center and Feminist workshop in Lviv invite you to the exhibition Motherhood, which was exposed in March at Visual Culture Research Center (Kyiv) and now will take place at Lviv Art Palace from July 3 untill 19, 2015.

Exhibition Motherhood suggests a feminist perspective on such traditional woman «function» as giving birth and raising a child. Which maternal experiences are hidden from publicity? What efforts have to be made for the sake of formation and development of a new human being? How is the topic of motherhood revealed in the work of female artists, even though giving birth often makes them put creative work on the back burner? What does the potential opportunity of becoming a mother mean to every woman? These and other issues will be questioned in the works of artists from Ukraine, Poland, Russia, Moldova, Hungary, Austria, and Sweden.

Analyzing the role and status of mothers in the society, the exhibition represents motherhood as a hard corporal and mental work that makes our existence possible. The dialogue with mothers is a dialogue with the history of one’s own life, which deserves to be a public issue.

Participants:
Oksana Briukhovetska, Anna Fabricius, Tatiana Fiodorova, Marta Frej, Ksenia Gnylytska, Masha Godovannaya, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Alina Jakubenko, Alevtina Kakhidze, Alina Kleitman, Joanna Rajkowska, Emma Thorsander, Marina Vinnik, Anna Witt

Curator
Oksana Briukhovetska

Exhibition will be open every day at the address:
Lviv Art Palace,
Lviv, 17 Kopernika Street

Open hours: 11 a. m. – 6 p. m.
Monday: CLOSED

Admission is free

Organization partner – Feminist workshop

Supported by Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung in Ukraine, Kyiv

Contacts:

+38 (093) 5536109 (Anna Khvyl)
+38 (093) 8739046 (Julia Zakoliabina)

www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to a presentation of Ukrainian Night photo essay book and opening of Miron Zownir’s exhibition that will take place on Saturday, June 20, at 18:00. The exhibition will last until July 12, 2015.

Ukrainian Night is a photo essay book by Miron Zownir and Kateryna Mishchenko, which can be considered a snapshot of Ukraine that absorbed numerous stories of urban life and dramatic landscapes of different areas of the country. This is a journey to the edge of the society that is both radical and lyrical. The book was published in 2015 by a German publishing house Spector Books Leipzig in English-Ukrainian and German-Ukrainian languages.

In 2012-13 Miron Zownir and Kateryna Mishchenko travelled through Ukraine, exploring and documenting social margins and dark sides of everyday life of the country. Zownir took pictures of people, situations, urban landscapes, particularly homeless teenagers’ life in Odessa, vagrants at Kyiv railway station, drug addicts in Poltava, an orphanage in Chernivtsi, the last Ukrainian Victory Parade in Sevastopol on May 9, 2013, the devastated industrial landscape of Donbas, and finally, the Maidan in Kyiv in March 2014.

Zownir’s photography and Mishchenko’s essays form a poetic document of deep social disruptions, which can be read as an epilogue to the changes Ukraine undergoes today.

“Ukrainian Night” is the third exhibition by Miron Zownir at Visual Culture Research Center. The first exhibition in 2011 presented the best of Zownir’s works, made during the last 30 years, and was complemented by a retrospective of his films. The second exhibition “Okraїna” in 2012 presented photos from Kyiv, Łódź, Moscow, and Warsaw, and was devoted to “citizens of the margins,” urban outcasts rejected by the societies of Eastern Europe.

About the authors:

Miron Zownir is a photographer, writer and film director. He was born in Karlsruhe (Germany) in 1953 to a Ukrainian father and German mother. In the age of 20 he went to Berlin, where he independently taught himself to photograph and took pictures of active at that time punk movement. In 1980 he moved to the US and lived in New York, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh for 15 years. There he made expressionist portraits of social outsiders. International exhibitions and publications revealed his stylistic closeness to such avant-garde artists as Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman. In 1998 his photo-book Radical Eye was published, in 2010 – The Valley of the Shadow (both in Gestalten publishing house).

Kateryna Mishchenko is an essayist, publisher and translator, who lives in Kyiv. She is a co-founder and editor of independent publishing house “MEDUSA”. She taught literary history in Kyiv Linguistic University, worked as a translator and coordinator in social and human rights sphere, edited Prostory magazine. Mishchenko translates German literature (Alfred Döblin, Durs Grünbein, Günther Brus), academic and philosophic texts (Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Keti Chukhrov). Her essays were published in Ukrainian and international magazines, as well as in anthologies by German publishing house Suhrkamp, devoted to the Euromaidan and military conflict in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Admission is free

A journey through Ukraine, preparation of book materials and its presentation take place within the framework of the Grenzgänger program, supported by Robert Bosch Stiftung

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.

Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street (1st floor), Kyiv)

Contacts:

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