WHY “UKRAINIAN CROSS-SECTION”?
Years ago, at the beginning of the 1990s, when founding “Dzyga we decided to begin all texts which would accompany our art projects with the following phrase: “IN OUR OPINION…”
That was not an escape from responsibility or a demonstration of “attitudinal subjectivity”: that was and still is our Freedom – of all together and each one in particular.
So, IN MY OPINION, the exhibition UKRAINIAN CROSS-SECTION is a cross-section of our contemporary art as we see it today, in the year of 2010.
I am talking not about “the Cross-Section of Ukraine” but about “Ukrainian Cross-Section” with an emphasis on “Ukrainianness”. The point, certainly, is an attempt to self-identify this Ukrainianness, to out a question about what really belongs to us.
What are our roots and mentality, what can we rely on, what schools do we have, what inspires us, what future is ahead of us?
What is a Ukrainian artist today? Is he doomed to make a choice between an endless replication of “national” pieces – all these embroidered shirts, Cossacks with moustaches in wide trousers, and a “modern” harvest from the former European avant-garde, that is of no interest to anyone in the West any more? I am afraid of these two extreme positions.
I take little interest in the artists who believe they know everything as well as in those who successfully imitate “the great”. I am looking for thoughtfulness rather than dull radicalism.
That is why I am choosing the artists whose art has an objective foundation, even though the art of many of them might be far from “contemporary”. We have quite a few wonderful painters who seek their own answers, bearing in mind their own inheritance. I would like to be rightly understood – I have no intention to deny the most avant-garde styles. I only wish artists to pass these styles through the prism of their identity.
Today we have to thoroughly study our Ukrainianness, and it’s better to do this under a microscope… Because it is a still undiscovered “something” that only now is being born out of great ruination, is being recreated from remnants in our subconscious, is being transformed into new thinking, is gaining respect to itself and the feeling of belonging to the country, irrespective of one’s language, origin and place of living. A new formation of Ukrainian artists has appeared that reflects this in their art. This is a chance to defi ne our place and who we are in reality, a chance to analyze origins of our culture and mentality.
UKRAINIAN CROSS-SECTION TRIES TO KEEP TRACK OF THIS PROCESS.
Curator of the project UKRAINIAN CROSS-SECTION
Vlodko Kaufman