Lada Nakonechna

Day 3: Learning from the Community: Collective Actions in the Face of Emergency

Perspective 8 - 13 November 2022.

Abstract

Not Waiting for the Emergency.
Collective practice in Ukraine that requires museums

Contemporary art in Ukraine is developing primarily thanks to the work of collectives, groups, communities, and grassroots initiatives. This presentation will emphasize the way in which these initiatives enter into relations with institutions, what kind of attitudes are required, and how institutional relations are imagined.

Specifically, it will examine the research and artistic seminar that the Method Fund has built in collaboration with the National Art Museum of Ukraine, titled ‘Socialist Realism. Seeming to be Another.’

While acquiring Socialist Realist art from the collections and archives of the National Art Museum of Ukraine, our goal was to examine the conditions under which it was created. At the same time, seeing contemporary art as a radical emancipatory method, the series of performative interventions into the exposition of the Socialist Realism period were conceived with the purpose of self-decolonization.

At some level, the artistic seminar provided the opportunity to reflect on the social identities constructed back in the Soviet era. Museums were forceful tools of Soviet politics, as through them a certain vision of history and reality was formed. What is a crucial is that the historically shaped perspective is still partly embodied in contemporary institutions. We clearly observe now how the legacy of Soviet Union with its terror and omnipresent newspeak plays a key role in the present state of war. Work on the representation of Socialist Realism in the museums appeared urgent, while also requiring untimely slowness, which the museum allows.

Biography

Lada Nakonechna is an artist and researcher based in Kyiv. In addition to her individual practice, she is involved in a number of group projects and collectives. Since 2005, she has been a member of the R.E.P. group; since 2008, part of the curatorial and activist union Hudrada; and since 2015, a cofounder of Method Fund, and, together with Kateryna Badianova, co-curator of its educational and research programs: Course of Art and CreatingRuine.net. In 2016, she joined the new editorial board of Prostory.net.ua, an online art, literature, and politics magazine. Her artworks, which often take the form of installations incorporating drawing, photography, and text, call attention to methods of recognition, revealing the internal aspects of visual and verbal structures. Her latest investigations are based on artistic and archival materials related to Socialist Realism — understood as a “method” and institutional and educational system. Her work has been exhibited widely in such venues as the National Art Museum of Ukraine; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Galerie für Zeitgenssische Kunst, Leipzig; Palais Populaire, Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Kunsthalltrondheim, Norway; Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg; and Center for Contemporary Art at NaUKMA, Kyiv. In 2014, she received the Kazimir Malevich Art Award.