exhibition
03 May 2022 > 15 May 2022

videogalleryChain ReactionFilm and video works from Ukraine

videogallery – free entry
curated by Mykola Ridnyi, Alessandra Troncone

Starting from a more documentary-like style, the screening helps providing an articulated and multi-faceted look not only on the Ukrainian video production but on a country that Europe feels even much closer today.

“When we started working on this project in 2021, our objective was to present the first focus on Ukrainian contemporary art in Italy, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the independence of Ukraine (1991),” tell the curators. Chain Reaction aims at underlining the independence of Ukrainian cultural and artistic production through the voices of some of its protagonists from the latest generation.

Piotr Armianovski | Uli Golub | Dana Kavelina | Oksana Kazmina | Zoia Laktionova | Oleksiy Radynsky | Mykola Ridnyi | Daniil Revkovskyi and Andriy Rachinsky | Ruins collective: Elias Parvulesco, Svitlana Pototska, Teta Tsybulnyk | Anna Scherbyna

Conceived as a fluid narrative between past, present and future, the show brings together a selection of films and videos presented in sequence as in a chain where different topics resonate and recall to each other, in a possible play of internal references that shows each work implicitly connected to the other. The sequence opens with a bird’s eye view of the Zamglai reserve, one of the largest bog systems in Ukraine, and ends with the dystopian – perhaps prophetic – image of an apocalyptic scenario where human presence has disappeared; general themes emerge from this “chain reaction” which meet and follow the international agenda (the effects of climate change, the gender issues), but which are also intertwined with events and aspects specifically linked to the Ukrainian socio-political context: the war in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions started in 2014, the massive labor emigration to EU countries, the struggle between human rights, feminist, LGBTQIA+ movements and conservative ideologies, urban transformation, ecological issues.

header: Piotr Armianovski, Sloviansk, 2014-2018.