28 September 2023 – 7 April 2024
The largest exhibition of Ukraine’s celebrated folk artist, and the first museum exhibition outside Europe, will include 200 works and highlight the 14 artworks not destroyed in Russia’s bombing of the Ivankiv museum in February 2022. The exhibition will later tour other museums in North America and Europe. A bilingual catalogue will highlight her work and her importance.
27 April – 2 September 2023
Acclaimed contemporary painter from Ukraine who since the Russian invasion has been the focus of global media discussion and attention. This will be her first museum exhibition in North America, and will include paintings made specifically for the Museum.
27 April – 2 September 2023
Rediscovered Ukrainian American folk artist who influenced the New York art world in the 1930s and 1940s. This will be the first museum exhibition focusing on her early work, which incorporated various Ukrainian images and motifs.
Through 5 March
The body of photojournalist Maks Levin – unarmed, wearing a press jacket, and bearing signs of torture before being shot twice by Russian soldiers – was found outside Kyiv on 1 April 2022. A 40-year-old father of four, Levin had been photographing Russia’s war on Ukraine since the initial invasion in 2014. This exhibition features 25 of Levin’s final photos, most of them taken since February 2022.
30 September 2022 – 8 January 2023
With the exception of a few large museums in Kyiv, Lviv, and Odesa, all of Ukraine’s museums are closed. The Russian invasion has put cultural activities on hold. Mirroring a dystopian science fiction film, museums across Ukraine are in cultural hibernation: staff work from home, artworks have been wrapped and stored, windows are boarded up. Once active and vibrant galleries sit in dark silence.
Impact Damage, meaning visible physical damage or destruction, recreates a shuttered museum somewhere in Ukraine. The galleries are filled with the museum’s collection, from paintings and sculptures to embroidered garments and historic ceramic objects. Yet there are no lights to fully navigate the exhibition; the galleries are dark and dismal. The only light comes from three large video projections by the Kyiv-based film collective Babylon’13. The collective consists of 100 activist filmmakers, photography directors, sound engineers, producers, and editors. The group has been working together since November 2013, and is now creating short narrative films about the current war. Their stories reflect the drama and tragedy across the country and the charged moments outside the walls of a museum in any city. This exhibition is intended to parallel and create emotional connections to what cultural institutions in Ukraine are experiencing on a daily basis.
30 September 2022 – 8 January 2023
A well-known poet and self-taught painter, Emma Andijewska believes in the creative powers of the unconscious. Her imagery evinces the desire to transcend ordinary life and to undermine logical language. In her art, as in her poetry, surrealist images emerge from the startling juxtapositions of magic landscapes, strange creatures, and ordinary objects, all brimming with awe-inspiring bright colors. Each artwork offers kaleidoscopic portraits of both the familiar and the unfamiliar, as figures shift and morph in countless ways throughout a lifetime of work-making. Gradually, Andijewska has built her grotesque, sometimes dark, universe where complex figures, naked and distorted bodies, chimeric animals, and cartoon-like characters overlap, mingle, intertwine, or multiply on sheets of paper, while some parts remain surprisingly abstract. Her vocabulary is expansive and cumulative, and stems from improvisation. Drawings range from simple images to richly illustrated pages, filled entirely with complex figures and textures. They evoke networked worlds that challenge past and present artistic canons and renew conventional ways of seeing.
This exhibition draws on the museum’s collection of Emma Andijewska’s acrylic paintings on paper, revealing her vision rooted in the marvelous and the spontaneous that closely correlates to the aesthetics of surrealism. Born in Donetsk, Ukraine, Andijewska resides in Munich, Germany.
Through 15 April
For the past 25 years, Yelena Yemchuk has been pushing the boundaries of contemporary photography and film. What first appears to be a simple image reveals, upon closer examination, great complexity of narrative and production. Yemchuk carries out her artistic vision by working in series, questioning the validity of a single perceptual possibility. Yemchuk’s exhibition includes two veins of her studio practice: photography and film.
For Odesa, which highlights four years of work in the southern city, Yemchuk photographed the city and its inhabitants. The series encompasses youth, landscapes, and quirky urban details. Yemchuk explores the subject of Ukraine in a post-Soviet time, living conditions in post-communist Eastern Europe, and the fallen ideals of the Soviet Union.
Malanka, Yemchuk’s latest film, depicts a visitor to Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains, looking for someone during the festive New Year’s Eve folk holiday. As he travels from village to village in his search, surreal images of masks and costumes abound. Occasional fade-outs and fade-ins to the main character are used to represent a unique point of view. Time becomes a topic as the story travels forward, yet for certain locations in the film it stands still. This is the world premiere of Malanka.
Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Yelena Yemchuk immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was eleven. She went on to study at both Parsons School of Art and Design, New York, and ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Another Magazine, ID, Dazed & Confused, and Italian, British, and Japanese Vogue, among others.
For more info, please visit: birdinflight.com/nathnennya-2/project-uk/pobachiti-odesu-i-zavmerti.html
Yelena Yemchuk is funded in part by:
Ongoing
Most of the works in this exhibition are on loan from private collections, and most are made of clay, Gerulak’s preferred medium. A given work can be about functional design or about purely creative art, and occasionally about both. Befitting her roots, Gerulak imaginatively continues to use beguiling imagery in her ceramic work, reflecting the same fascination with her heritage and the richness with which it can be translated into clay. She adapts iconic likenesses of mermaids, nymphs, protectresses, mother and child, villagers in folk costumes, and head adornment with floral wreaths to the style of her own figural ceramics so successfully that they manifest the unmitigated embodiment of womanhood. Gerulak draws upon lush imagery and abundant Ukrainian customs, but creatively renews and revises these traditions as well.
