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36 shots in the form of bright blue balloons that open up in the skies into splendid green-violet peonies
13 — 28.03 2015
Ya Gallery art centre in Dnipro

"Among bodies, studios, talks, acts and memories" - thus, with a considerable degree of uncertainty, we tried to outline art practices of contemporary Lviv and Uzgorod during our research at the beginning of 2014. It was an insufficiently outspoken feeling that our close contact with both cities' art stages brought. Extended in time and space continuous observations, organization of private things, images and texts, and various, almost routine occupations run through everyday life of local artists and communities, avoiding steadiness, precision and completeness.

 

"36 shots in the form of bright blue balloons that open up in the skies into splendid green-violet peonies" it is a passage from Stanislav Turina's last poetry collection that the author took from an instruction on a box of fireworks. This phrase, which shimmers with shades of meaning as a context of use changes, unexpectedly seizes that special type of an artistic thinking which is hard to describe since such thinking is determined not by a process of "creating" a finished project or a piece of art, but by chaotic and simultaneously conscious art practices, dissolved in a lifestyle and its perception, where borders between private and public, professional and amateurish, domestic and working, individual and common, created and found - are overpassed easily and in both directions.

"Open archive" became for us a form to study art practices of Lviv and Uzhgorod. It is built from single authors' profiles in a family-tree style. However, on-line platform openarchive.com.ua provides for another way of reading - by tags, separated in a process of research according to the way of creation, representation or thematic content of individual projects. These tags create numerous connections, and their intersections share knowledge about local arts.

 

The exhibition "36 shots" follows principles of an archive in exposition and builds a network narration with enlisting miscellaneous items - independent pieces of art, fragments of long-lasting projects, documenting of acts and activities, craft supplies, artifacts of an exhibition process (originals and copies), samvydav (self-publishing) and many texts of different quality.

 

The only work created specially for Ya Gallery in Dnipropetrovsk - "One m3" by Open Group. According to the artists' proposition and art center managers' agreement, Open Group will receive an appointed cubical meter of gallery space in the Gusenko Str. 17 for their own exhibition activity - as long as the gallery exists in that certain space. Such sanctioned "partizaning" is the artists' very first attempt to export their own way of creative thinking into another context, even more - into another institution's territory with their own program, tasks and strategy. Mutual responsibility and trust between the artist and the institution, which are necessary conditions to release this project, are an important precedent in professional relations in an artistic sphere.

 

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