Borys Filonenko. Culture Under Pressure

Going for water, artists can bring a few black holes from the well of modernity. These are not necessarily ‘works’, they may not have defined boundaries, beginning and end, and the exhibition is just one of the possible forms of existence for these practices. ‘Do artists need an exhibition?’ — that's the question with which this collection begins. Artistic practices here are part of extensive networks of visual culture, political systems, interspecies interdependencies, environmental disasters and the totality of war.

In the collection of selected texts from 2020-2024, critic Borys Filonenko writes about the Kharkiv Biennale of Young Art, the Ukrainian Pavilion in Venice, the Khanenko Museum, the practices of the Open Group, Viacheslav Polyakov, Katia Buchatska, Nikita Kadan, Pavlo Makov, Andrii Sahaidakovskyi, Katia Libkind, Stanislav Turina, Yaroslav Futymskyi, Mykola Kolomiets, Lia Dostleva and Andrii Dostlev, Daniil Revkovskyi and Andrii Rachynskyi. These are texts about art in times of excess and exhaustion, about the historiographical turn, the avant-garde and the dinosaur bone, about studios and shelters, volunteering and broad social connections, and the role of artists in a threatening environment.

Team

Author: Borys Filonenko

Publisher: ist publishing

Design and layout: Volodymyr Havrysh

Cover image: Nikita Kadan, Revisionist Syndrome, 2021. Work by N. based on Leopold Levitsky, 1970s

Literary editing: Oleksandra Sauliak 

Communications manager: Polina Sopolieva

Project management: Anastasia Leonova, Kateryna Nosko

Printing: KOLO private enterprise, Drohobych