The Project consisted of four blocks: Live Classics, Authors’ Projects (curator - Vlodko Kaufman), Days of Performance Art in L’viv (curator - Valdemar Tatarchuk) and MediaDepo (coordinator - Bogdan Shumylovych)

20.09.10

 Start - Live Classics

The TYZHDEN/Week of Contemporary Art was launched with the Live Classics block. It included the exhibitions by the known and recognized artists, a  dozen years ago to be the representatives of an  underground art.  Roman Zhuk, L’viv ex-resident, since the 90th has been living in  the Netherlands, presented very ironic still lifes and portraits recomfirming the fact that   realism  can occupy a worthy place in contemporary art. The Ukrainian art patriarchs’ tandem , Vasyl' Bazhay  (Lviv) and Tiberiy Silvashi  (Uzhgorod) demonstrated the emotional power of abstract painting. The exposition was based on the contrast principle: Bazay’s canvases, soft, meditative, prudential & Silvashi’s ones -   bright, dynamic, thoughtful,  they made the impession to be rather  grown than drawn.

That day the TYZHDEN block Authors’ Pojects  demonstrated  the variety of genres, styles, forms  and ideas and it was  located in the Palace of Arts. The Kherson group Totem presented   its conceptual projects Diffluent TV - a compilation of absurd parodies of some TV shows  making you not only to laugh but to think as well. The Totem  also presented  a series of photos Lucid Dreaming ...

Anton Logov,  a young Kyiv abstractionist  (curator - Pavlo Gudimov Art Center YA GALLREY)  exhibited  the  grandiose  canvases  entitled  Distance 

L’viv artist Olga Pylnyk  presented the  installation Chinvazia composed of alabastrine Chinamen’s  heads  and Chinese  misic toys making you to  think about  Chinese world expansion.
The similar problem was considered by the Uzhgorod artist  Beata Korn in her colorful  collage- installation Project start1.

Kostya Smolyaninov, curator PhotoClub "5x5",  exposed the  top-quality as for  color &  composition photos  and Victor Melnychuk proposed his  video installation Breathing consisting of twelve monitors looking like aquariums & demonstrating   the  heads of people rising from the water to catch a breath of air .

21.09.10

Authors’ Projects

Gallery DZYGA (creation-organizational TYZHDEN stronghold)  hosted the exhibition by 12 Polish artists , representatives of the  famous Polish Gallery BIAłA  from Lublin city. The exposition demonstrated  a large cross-section of contemporary genres: painting, collage, object, installation, photography, street art ... Namely: Eliza Galey’s  canvases piercing by means of   Braille print,   Paulina Sadovska’s  animation, Carolina Komorovska’s  mock-up imitation of family mattress & nepkins.  Ilona Oshust’s& Thomash Byelyaka’s  stencils, Jan Hryk’s  paintings with a  skull and the pictures consisting of the pieces of  biscuits, Kamil Stanchak’s models of suburb  buildings,  Anna Navrot’s object – dummy  made of neckties, Krzysztof Bryla’s  doors-ticks, Irena Navrot’s  self-portrait - photo-collage , the illustrations of the meanings of the word «suka»/ bitch by  Kama Bubych  and  Frida Kahlo’s  "photo-portraits" by Danuta Kutsyak..

The wall of the former shop “Artist" just in the center of L’viv was decorated with the strret-art - Pink Panther by  Olexiy Khoroshko.  That was its third emersion (after Berlin & Warsaw). A sort of  Friz Freleng’ message for  the  victims of glamor.

The Museum of  Ideas presented the following installations: Jacek Yahelsky (Poland) demonstrated the mechanical installation made of the bird feathers & stone-pendulum, Jaroslav Pershko (Poland) exposed some dynamic installation consisting of the  double-wall aquarium  wth the sand between them  (walls) & the paint penetrating into the sand and  every  one day varying  its form. And  Oles’ Dzyndra, the host of the Musem of Ideas, created some ponderous  mechanism entitled  TOUCH and  that “object” occurred to be not a  catapult or  a inquisitional rack but the  device for a soft & delicate touching the water surface.

22.09.10

Jam Factory

 

It was for the second time the TYZHDEN/Week of Contemporary Week  was largely located  within the phantasmagorias ruins  of the Jam Factory ( dated back to the 16th century, the former  wine cellars ). Some expected & quite  unexpected places there “exposed” the   bizarre objects,  just like  the environment was. 

 

Video installation by Mykhaylo Barabash, Oleksa Furdiyak and Oleg Voronko exploited  the human  conditioned  reflexes  and filled the basements with  the  ethanethiol usually used for flavoring natural gas. Oleksa Furdiyak presented also his installation Armstrong on the Moon devoted to the  on " Armstrong Syndrome”- the falsification of historical events.

Bogdan Yanchuk & his  video installation  Arch of Desire -  two silhouettes entitled " Bogdan "invited  the audience to admire the video version of  mankind’s banal desires (money, cars, villas, health, vacation, etc.).

The social protest entitled  Good Guy Policeman  by Kharkiv artist Taras Kaminnyj  (Camus)  demonstrated the face of a policeman  painted on the wall & pieces of brick on the floor urging to hurl some of them into the face. There were many volunteers...
The strictly gender installation  The Girls are Planning Something Nasty was  presented by Alina Kleytman ( both Alina & Camus were curated by the Kharkiv Municipal Gallery).  Her installation consisted of the  video demonstrating  a girl with a knife disemboweling a toy rabbit,  the  paintings accompanied  that process, the victim-bunny and the bath with fish and red-water. It looked  like the transformation process (girl-woman) was  very painful as the virtual person on the television screen was hardly trying to  catch  the real hammer hanging nearby the TV set. 
 
 

Andriy Sahaydakovsky and Olena  Turyanska presented very thin (direct meaning ) installation, entitled  Culture: Definition of the Word. The small room was filled with many strained  translucent strings – one of the ways to “translate” some  verbal language  into the  visual one. 
Andriy  Barna (Dnipropetrovsk city) created the complicated  installation Chronos' Tumblers.  The white room with white  interior “hid”  several projectors, they used to “wake up” from time to time & to demonstrate choosing some  unexpected directions the video sketches resembling the  pieces fished up from someone's memory. 
 

Another artist from Dnipropetrovsk Daniil l Galkin  presented two projects. The first one  - video installation Catharsis. The second project  was entitled  Meeting of the Fire  Extinguisher & Meat-Mincer in the Cardiopulmonary .
The evening came to its end with the  performens Absorbed by the  Kyiv  art group Skrag Ajsedora.  Some incomprehensible ritual performance accompanied by the gloomy music and video demonstrating the life of  amoebas & ciliates  As the artists stated themselves, it was  "the birth of a social animal”.


23.09.10 – 26.09.10

 The Power of Art, Days of Performance Art in L'viv 

26.09.10 – 29.09.10

MediaDepo

Since Thursday the Theatre for Youth has been hosting the MediaDepo  - the festival in a festival, “dedicated” to the  media-art & coordinated by the unchallengeable  Bogdan Shumylovych . All day long the selection of variegated video-pieces was demonstrating in the Theatre and in the evening Bogdan commented on each work giving the information about the  author and helping to find out some clue  to its understanding. The first day presented the WRO (Wroclaw Art Center) compilation of video-works selected by Andriy Linik. Accordingly to the Tyzhden conception -  Abstract  vs Real -  he presented as entirely abstract,  computer modeled 3D- animations  as  at most realistic, mainly of social direction works

 Friday and Saturday occurred to be the most informative as for educational terms. Firstly, those days PhD Janina Prudenko lectured on the history of Ukrainian media art.  Secondly, Bogdan Shumylovych presented the best videos of the  winners of the  two most prominent European media art festivals : Ars Electronica and Transmediale. Thirdly, the most “large scale” works were demonstrated  just those days.  On Friday -  «Decasia» (Bill Morrison’s  visualization  of the atonal symphony by Michael Gordon). . And on Saturday, after the lecture,  the British VJ Vicki Bennett presented the ironical “patchwork” made of the episodes  from famous movies and compiled  in an independent narrative. On Sunday the Mediadepo & Tyzhden/ Week of Contemporary Art  came to its end to the accompaniment of the project  Secret Understanding  - series of videos  inspired by the rare versions of songs by famous bands and singers: Hendrix, Sigur Rós, 50 Cent, Jay-Z, Beck and others.

31.09.10

P.S.

So, step by step the Tyzhden/ Week of Contemporary Art  lays the foundation for the appearance of  some new phenomena in  the Ukrainian culture, for the audience to be not afraid of something unfamiliar, for people seeking mental nourishment  to find it, for L’viv  to be associated not only with Secession architecture& symphony orchestras but also as center for contemporary  art.

Tyzhden was held for the third time and year by year it uses to attract more audience, to demonstrate a professional upgrowth and to became more representative. The audience visiting it  become more persnickety and more educated. Tyzden’s  role  is not just “exhibitional”  but mostly educational one,  as contemporary art  demands not only the one way of interpretation, it requires constant self-discipline,  ability to learn continuously, to rethink and to  be ready for the fact that every next artist may  try to puzzle and to succumb to doubtquestion all previous ideological achievements.

Tyzhden/Week of Contemporary Art intends to be transformed into Biennale format, so let’s long last 2012 and then we’ll create if not the installations then at least,  the performance of our own lives.

Photo: Kostya Smolyaninov, Bozena Gorodnicka