Exhibition

Lower Level installation

Ukrainian folk art is filled with mysterious symbols that for generations have been applied to various items, imbuing them with magical and protective powers. People believed that these objects protected them from evil. They brought and preserved good luck, ensured prosperity, and helped fulfill wishes, hopes, and desires. The symbols were applied to everyday items made of various materials – textiles, leather, wood, metal, clay, eggs, and even bread – using techniques such as carving, embossing, painting, weaving, embroidering, and baking. Over time, the meaning of these symbols was forgotten, but they gradually evolved into elaborate ornamental designs that serve as a vivid attestation of the creative ingenuity of the Ukrainian people. Among these items are the ubiquitous pysanka (Easter egg) and an array of embroidered items – ritual cloths (rushnyky), men’s and women’s shirts, and other items of apparel – with their wealth of ornamental designs from various regions of Ukraine.

   

Lobby Installation

Postcards from Ukraine aims to record the damage inflicted on Ukrainian culture from the bombing and shelling by Russian troops since Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Since this war began, Russian troops have been destroying Ukraine’s historical, architectural, and archaeological monuments every day. The Russian military is cynically and ruthlessly shelling museums, memorials, university buildings, and cinemas, and dropping rockets on churches, temples, cathedrals, TV towers, and monuments. Russia is not just destroying Ukrainian cities and villages; it is systematically destroying Ukraine’s cultural heritage, which dates back thousands of years.

Today, more than ever, we need solidarity and support from the international community.

This project was developed by the Ukrainian Institute with the support of USAID and in cooperation with the creative agency Green Penguin Media. We also thank Oleksandr Vynohradov and Yulia Hrubrina for their expert collaboration. For more information, visit: https://ui.org.ua/en/postcards-from-ukraine/

   

26 June 2022 – 5 March 2023

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.

20 January – 15 April 2023

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:

18 December 2021 – 5 March 2023

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.

20 January – 15 April 2023

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