Current Exhibitions

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:

Through 15 April

The Lemko artist Nikifor is considered one of the world’s finest outsider artists of his time. Born with a hearing and speech impediment and orphaned during World War I, Nikifor was unable to communicate with the people around him. He was initially treated like a misfit and ridiculed by the people of his hometown, Krynica. For most of his life, he found himself isolated both physically and emotionally. Art became an outlet, a focus for his life.

The topics of Nikifor’s art include self-portraits and panoramas of Krynica, with its spas and Orthodox and Catholic churches. Throughout his vast body of drawings, Nikifor interweaves classic landscapes and memories. Each drawing offers a kaleidoscope of both the familiar and the unfamiliar. Meticulous and lovingly rendered, his drawings range from those with the tightly wound tension of horror vacui, where absolutely no space on the paper is without the hash mark of a pencil, to others that breathe with open space and create a different type of tension, leading to the question of what is missing. It is a unique and powerful approach to landscape imagery. Unmarked open areas appear to exert pressure on the forms found populating the page, as if a strong gust of wind or invisible field is in fact occupying space, unseen to the viewer.

Nikifor (born Epifanii Drovniak, 1895–1968) gifted us with a visual index of a lifetime’s worth of visual information, regurgitated and reassembled in countless ways. Each drawing is a window offering a deeply internal vortex of forms and articulations rendered in watercolor and colored pencils. For Nikifor, who was non-verbal, art-making was his communication.

The exhibition at The Ukrainian Museum includes 135 works from its collection. Curated by Myroslava Mudrak, professor emerita of art history at The Ohio State University, the exhibition will be accompanied by a major catalogue to be published by Rodovid Press in Kyiv.

Nikifor is funded in part by:

Prof. Zirka Voronka in memory of husband Prof. Roman Voronka