KYIV.- The PinchukArtCentre presents the Insubordinate exhibition, which showcases the practice of two Odesa-based venues: the NOCH gallery and the art community located at the SRZ-2.
The exhibition is a part of the Research Platform and PAC UA programme.
Insubordinate highlights a historical process in the unofficial art movement that avoided power ties in the cultural field. Running parallel to the exhibition ‘Oleksandr Roitburd: Power Theory,’ it offers an insightful view into the Odesa art scene. Like the Research Platform, these exhibitions are aimed to show the connections within the art community. "Insubordinate" archives phenomena that have recently ceased to exist due to the full-scale war.
Insubordinate is an exhibition about the possibility of thinking separately and uncoordinated in moments of powerful social consensus. Essentially, it's about the loneliness of art as a form of its political nature.
Both artistic communities NOCH and SRZ-2 were active in Odesa at the turn of 2010-2020. The NOCH gallery, which functioned in the studio of the artist Oleksandra Kadzevych (co-initiated by Harry Kraievets), was a place where experimental projects were conducted which could not take part in official or commercially oriented art institutions in Odesa.* At the same time, it was a place where microcommunities were formed and considered as an alternative centre of gravity for the independent art scene. For the exhibition Insubordinate, the NOCH що team decided to show the works of Odesa-based artist Andrii Lavrykov (Borman), which is an echo of the gallery's Odesa program.
A temporary collaboration SRZ-2, consisted of Dasha Chechushkova, Illia Todurkin and a third member who shall remain anonymous at his own request, was a part of a rather massive and multifaceted artistic movement in the shipyard. This community, which defined itself through the idea of “coexistence,” had the hallmarks of a sect, family or mystical union. Now, after numerous transformations and even after its formal dissolution, it still influences the worldview and style of a wider range of young Ukrainian artists.
These two groups were united by the idea of staying out of the struggle for power in the cultural field and avoiding domination and subordination relations altogether. In other words, they were united by a desperate attempt to “just be” in their unique way, not competing with any other. Being insubordinate often signifies marginality. At the same time, the insubordinate is freedom of manoeuvre, a possibility of an unexpected, paradoxical and life-saving response where the power-oriented logic of competition, populism and ideological subservience lead artistic movements to a dead end.
Curated by Nikita Kadan.
*The term “institution” is not used in this context, as it is excessively loaded with specific requirements that were mostly seen as unrealistic at that time and place.
