Ukrainian Contemporary Art in International Space (on the example of the project Hope!)

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to describe the conceptual and organisational framework of the Hope! project at the 56th Venice Biennale in the context of how the art responded to the events in Ukraine which took place from 2014 to 2024. The research methodology is based on general scientific theoretical methods of analysis, synthesis and abstraction, complemented by the comparative and observational methods. The scientific novelty is that, for the first time in the Ukrainian art criticism, the Hope! project has been analysed as an ‘artistic chronicle of the war’. The study highlights the importance of Ukrainian contemporary art in the international context through this example. Conclusions. The project, which represented Ukraine, was structured as a collective exhibition of individual artistic practices. It focused the visitor’s attention on the military conflict initiated by Russia in the east of Ukraine in 2014, marking the first Ukrainian project of this nature at the Venice Biennale. In subsequent years, this trend continued as the conflict escalated into a full-scale war in 2022. The specifics of the Ukrainian National Pavilion, represented by the project Hope! and developed by PinchukArtCentre (curated by Bjorn Geldhof), is examined. The works of Zhanna Kadyrova, Yevheniia Belorusets, Artem Volokitin, Anna Zviagintseva, Mykyta Kadan, Mykola Ridnyi, and Serhii Zhadan are analysed. The project is characterised as a blend of artists’ emotional responses and reflections on particular processes and events that took place in Ukraine in 2014-2015. It is identified as a snapshot of contemporary artistic trends that merged experimental artistic practices with an emotional component (artist’s experience = audience’s emotions = perception of Ukraine’s situation). The almost ten-year break between projects from Ukraine at the 56th and 60th Venice Biennales became one of the stages of Ukrainian art's search for its own ‘I’ on the international art market and testified to the high level of empathy of domestic artists.