JEWELED SKY, MORNING BLOCKS
The new pilot exposition opened at Kyiv’s Block A Gallery provides vivid evidence that today’s Ukrainian art is learning to be relevant in the truest sense of the word. Behind the standard title of Fatherland’s Morning is a homey (I would even say like a daycare center) and unpretentious project, although dealing with two Ukrainian politicians, Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yushchenko, that are perhaps today’s most newsworthy figures. This rather heterogeneous duet inspired a team of artists, led by the capital’s reputed art leader Anatoly Fedirko, to make a real pictorial journey.
The incumbent president and premier, despite their polarized characters, habits, even destinies, appear to have something touchingly in common; both were born in the countryside. Kuchma comes from Chaikino in Chernihiv oblast and Yushchenko from Khoruzhivka, Sumy oblast. This agrarian paradox prompted the team of artists originating from Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Cherkasy, and Chernivtsi to go on a virtual tour, visiting these villages. The results of this political outing have been explored by our Polish neighbor, as Fatherland’s Morning was displayed in Krakow once it was ready. Now is our fatherland’s turn.
Some fifteen rural landscapes familiar to the Ukrainian eye — ponds, rivers, cows, geese, and village houses — are, so to speak, the picturesque content of the exposition. The specific aspect is that viewers were offered a game of sorts, as each was to reproduce landscapes hanging from the walls on the floor by putting them together the way children do with blocks. And visitors, young and old alike, got down to the strange business of fitting the big homeland into a small one with an enviable enthusiasm (on the reverse side of every painting was a section of the map of Ukraine). The whole atmosphere reminded one not of an avant-garde performance but of a morning game at a daycare center. No one said a single word about the ongoing crisis. In the end, everybody won, receiving sweets in lieu of prizes.
The whole affair looked like a party. An abstract map of Ukraine, a nation still unable to become conscious of itself, not even within these painted boundaries, easily transforming into anonymous leveled out landscapes. Even the names of specific localities have no meaning, since there thousands of such villages in our country, and all are in basically the same lamentable condition. By and large, hard as the organizers tried to be sarcastic about our gentry myths, Fatherland’s Morning spelled our cherished, albeit many times ridiculed, desire to see a sky jeweled with stars. Well, if not see then at least put it together, using children’s blocks.
Did it work?
