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STROLLS WITH PLEASURE AND NOT WITHOUT MORAL
08.09 — 04.11 2016
арт-центр Я Галерея в Дніпрі
Smolyanynov Kostiantyn Topiy Volodymyr Kinder AlbumГрупа "Група"Марія ГоїнЮрій КовальОлена Субач

Ya Gallery Art Center in Dnipro. 

08.09.2016 – 04.11.2016

 

 

Exhibition profile at the gallery page

 

Group "Group" / Mariia Hoin / Yurii Koval / Konstiantyn Smolyanynov / Olena Subach / Volodymyr Topiy / Kinder Album

This is one of the first attempts to bring together, organize and present achievements of participants of the "Group" as a united project, though partly contradicting its own logic of spontaneous development and general absence of common visual language among authors.

 

 

Group "Group" was founded in 2014 in Lviv as an unstable collective of artists united by love for photography, travelling and ... food. The format of long-term and for now the only project of the “Group" called " Strolls with Pleasure and not without Moral" was born from an ironic proposal to go on picnics and call it art. Invited by an ideologist and a permanent leader of the group Konstiantyn Smolyanynov, anybody interested (and not always personally acquainted with him) within cultural environment of Lviv joined one-day trips to interesting, mysterious and absurd places in Galicia with obligatory local food tasting and aimless at first sight flanerie with a photo camera in hands. The route and plan of such trips is previously known only to Smolyanynov, however they always involve some freedom of improvisation for fellow travelers.

 

The final product of these trips does not provide any stylistic or thematic integrity, and its aesthetics resembles rather amateur documentation than professional reportage. Cameras focus on notable local landscapes as well as their weedy elements and invited models as well as incidental passersby or participants themselves. Smolyaninov calls the last ones "wanderers", and everything happening during trips - "hiperformance", sarcastically commenting on obsession with terminology, which is characteristic for the world of art. And the biggest horror for him is rearranging gathered material into an exhibition or even just showing it to somebody.

 

"Strolls ..." in the Ya Gallery art centre in Dnipro is one of the first of such attempts to bring together, organize and present achievements of the most active participants of the "Group" as a united project, though partly contradicting its own logic of spontaneous development and general absence of common visual language among authors. The only structural element in the group's work are the letters that Smolyaninov sent to participants after the "strolls". These texts filled with literary elegance have been since used as description for each "hiperformance" and are presented in the exhibition as integral parts of collective's history.

The main ambition of this exhibition is not demonstration of chronology of events or artistic values of individual photographs, but rather an attempt to convey the subjective experience of co-creators of five performances at intersection of local history expedition, gastro-tour, photography and happening.


Group "Group"- situational gathering of people without permanent membership founded by representatives of photo club "5x5" in Lviv. The only permanent member of the group is photographer Konstiantyn Smolyanynov. Participants of group events included Mariia and Volodymyr Topiy, Olena and Yurii Koval, Myroslava and Mariana Klochko, Kinder Album, Serhii Murallo, Olena Subach, Viacheslav Poliakov, Yurii Yaremchuk, Olha Kraievska, Volodymyr Mazur, Brak Wykonawcy, Halyna Kulyk, Yurii Hrynyk, Vlodko Kaufman and often people unknown to Smolyanynov. Documentation of projects was presented at the group exhibition Pavshyno Kunstverein under the biennale "Kyiv School" (Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany) in 2015 and in project "Degree of dependence" in festival "European Cultural Capital" (gallery Awangarda BWA, Wroclaw, Poland ) in 2016.

 

Curators would like to acknowledge the gallery managers Kateryna Semeniuk and Artem Hrechka for their valuable contribution to the project.