Event
ARC @ Venice Biennale
April 20 - November 24 | Venice
April 20 - November 24
Arsenale, Sale d'Armi, building A, 1st floor
Venice, Italy
Join ARC at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia as a proud supporter of the Ukrainian Pavilion. The exhibition opens to the public on April 20 and runs until November 24.
This year, the Ukrainian Pavilion will host the exhibition, “Net Making” curated by Viktoria Bavykina and Max Gorbatskyi. Since the full scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022, Ukrainians have united in a profound way. Collectivity and social cooperation have become ubiquitous in the country’s social fabric, as people of all ages have volunteered in the war efforts. One such way Ukranians have come together is by gathering to weave camouflage nets for soldiers. The act of net making serves as the overarching theme of the Ukraine Pavilion’s exhibition as the artists act as facilitators and mediators of creative processes in collaboration with different artistic communities.
“Net Making” features four artistic projects by six different artists. Oleksandr Burlaka’s project, “Work” embodies the traditional practices of home textile weaving, while simultaneously exploring narratives of personal experiences tied to cataclysms in Ukraine. The film “Civilians. Invasion” by Daniil Revkovskyi and Andrii Rachynskyi tells the story of the first days of the Russian invasion through the eyes of survivors, and is assembled from videos they found online. Katya Buchatska’s “Best Wishes” features the art of fifteen neurodiverse artists and explores language transformations amid life-threatening conditions. The video “Comfort Work” by Andrii Dostliev and Lia Dostlieva ironically investigates the stereotypes and expectations laid upon refugees in Europe. playfully creating a safe space for Ukrainians with the experience of displacement to reclaim their agency.
“Net Making” ties into the theme of the 60th Venice Biennale, “Stranieri Ovunque — Foreigners Everywhere, as each of the four pieces addresses the universal question of “otherness” and “the coexistence of diversity.”
Curators
Viktoria Bavykina
Viktoria Bavykina is a curator, art critic, and sociologist of culture. She works with photography, political art, and feminist optics in artistic practices. She was a curator of the Grynyov Art Collection and art director of the AKT art space in Kyiv, Ukraine. She co-curated the exhibitions Open Opportunity at M17 Contemporary Art Centre (2021, Kyiv), Volyazlovsky and All His Creative Life at YermilovCentre (2021, Kharkiv), Instant Time at Mystetskyi Arsenal (2018, Kyiv). She was a curator of the Kharkiv Photo Forum international conference on photography. In 2020, Bavykina defended her PhD in sociology of culture at V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. She is currently a student at the University of Liverpool, pursuing an MA in Art, Philosophy, and Cultural Institutions under the UK Government’s Chevening scholarship programme.
Max Gorbatskyi
Max Gorbatskyi is a curator at Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool, UK). He was a curator at the Department of Contemporary Art at the Mystetskyi Arsenal (Kyiv, Ukraine) where he co-curated a large-scale photography exhibition, Sensitivity. Contemporary Ukrainian Photography. Gorbatskyi’s long-time focus has been on contemporary Ukrainian photography and private photo archives. He is a recipient of the UK government’s Chevening Scholarship. He holds an MA in History of Photography at Birkbeck College, University of London, and an MA in Cultural Management at the University of Bologna.
Artists
Katya Buchatska
Katya Buchatska is an artist based in Kyiv. In her practice, she shapes a new ontology through personal experience, often employing irony and the tactic of “soft” intervention in various environments such as galleries, museums, or natural spaces. She actively participates in the initiative group dedicated to preserving the photographic legacy of the Hutsul artist Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit. Since 2016, she has been working with neurodivergent persons in the inclusive art studio Workshop of Possibilities located in Kyiv. Her works have been exhibited at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (Germany), Museum Folkwang (Essen, Germany), Art & History Museum (Brussels, Belgium), Albertinum (Dresden, Germany), Museum de Fundatie (Zwolle, the Netherlands), and MUSA Museo de las Artes Universidad de Guadalajara (Guadalajara, Mexico). Recent personal projects include Izyum to Liverpool at the Liverpool Cathedral (Liverpool, 2023), You Will See This Light On The Sunniest Day at the hunt kastner gallery (Prague, 2023), and A Very Personal Show at The Naked Room (Kyiv, 2020).
Andrii Dostliev
Andrii Dostliev is an artist, curator, and photography researcher. His primary areas of interest are collective trauma, the history of queerness in Ukraine, decolonial practices in Eastern Europe, and the limits of photography as a medium. His art practice encompasses photography, video, performance, and installation. Dostliev has published several photobooks. He exhibited his works at the Odesa National Art Museum (Odesa, Ukraine), Ludwig Museum (Budapest, Hungary), National Gallery of Art (Vilnius, Lithuania), Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, the Netherlands), and others.
Lia Dostlieva
Lia Dostlieva is an artist, cultural anthropologist and essayist. Her art and research practice engage with the issues of collective trauma, decolonial stories seen through multispecies entanglements, and agency and visibility of vulnerable groups. Dostlieva exhibited her works at the Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, the Netherlands), Kolumba Museum (Cologne, Germany), Ludwig Museum (Budapest, Hungary), National Gallery of Art (Vilnius, Lithuania), Tbilisi Photography and Multimedia Museum (Tbilisi, Sakartvelo), National Museum of Fine Arts (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan), Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga, Latvia), and others.
Oleksandr Burlaka
Oleksandr Burlaka is an architect and artist working with photography, research, and installation. He explores the history, architecture, urban planning, and their transformations in Ukraine. His focus is on spatial design. Burlaka graduated from the Kyiv University of Construction and Architecture with a master’s degree in architecture in 2005. He was nominated for the PinchukArtCentre Prize in 2013 and 2015 as part of the Objects Group and the Melnychuk-Burlaka group. Burlaka has been the architect for numerous exhibitions at the Mystetskyi Arsenal, the National Art Museum of Ukraine, the Dovzhenko Center, PinchukArtCentre, and projects for the Kyiv Biennale. Burlaka is a scholarship recipient of the Junge Akademie der Künste Berlin.
Daniil Revkovskyi
Daniil Revkovskyi is a Kharkiv-based artist. He graduated from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts. He works with such media as video and installation. In 2010, together with Rachynskyi, he created Memory, a public community, through which artists explored the collective memory in the post-Soviet space. In their practice, the artists combine fictional and commemorative practices: in this controversial connection of approaches, the artists manage to speak sharply about the topics of human responsibility and collective responsibility for historical events (namely, in the Tailings Dam and Mickey Mouseʼs Steppe projects).
Andrii Rachynskyi
Andrii Rachynskyi lives and works in Kharkiv and usually works with photography, video and installations. He graduated from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts. He started working with Daniil Revkovskyi in 2012. Personal exhibitions of artists: "Tail storage", Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv (2021), "Tail storage. Engineer", Voloshyn Gallery, Kyiv (2021), "Premonition of Catastrophe", Detenpyla Gallery, Lviv (2020), "Soot", Artsvit Gallery, Dnipro (2018). Also participated in numerous group projects: "Sensitivity", Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv (2021), "Soot", Etc. Galerie, Prague (2019), "Darkness", YermilovCentre, II Biennale of Young Art, Kharkiv (2019), "Soot", Exploding Cinema, London (2019), "Sources of Light", Local History Museum, Lysychansk (2017).