EVA’S RETURN
An exposition titled Female Problems and dedicated to female artists from the diaspora opened September 18 at the Cultural Heritage Museum (branch of the Museum of the History of Kyiv). For the first time the capital’s museum addressed not only experimental, but also conceptual art. One of the participants, Tetiana-Eva Gershuni, currently residing in Canada, is an original master of Ukrainian postmodern art of the 1990s.
Ukrainian О migr О artists are quite extensively represented at the Kyiv museums. The situation with conceptual art (generally referred to as contemporary art) is different. The fourth generation immigrant artists’ creative quest is off the perimeter of the Ukrainian Diaspora’s with its conservative creative outlooks, so it has no support in its information space. Until recently, artists pursuing this trend were practically unknown in Ukraine.
Tetiana-Eva Gershuni, born in Kyiv, is one of the most extraordinary modern Ukrainian painters; she is progressive and independent, rebellious by nature and given to experimentation. Even as a student in the Department of Art Theory and History of the Ukrainian Academy of the Arts, she transgressed on unwritten rules, wholeheartedly taking up contemporary art (painting, photography, and installation). After graduation, she decided against joining the overcrowded ranks of capital art critics and went into contemporary art all the way.
In 1994-95, Gershuni appeared in prestigious art exhibits in Kyiv and Odesa, authored the Ultradialog project at the Blank Art Gallery (no longer functioning), and took part in Ukraine’s first and practically only feminist creative project, Medusa’s Mouth, sired by progressive Ukrainian curator Natalia Filonenko.
Tetiana was the first in Ukraine to apply ultraviolet light as a visual effect, incorporating it in her Anabiosis show, one of the most interesting displays in the Ra Gallery’s history, Phantom Opera Project in Odesa, and US curator Martha Kuzma’s Views with Jam exhibit at Kyiv’s Modern Art Center. Oleksandr Roitburd, an ideologist of contemporary Ukrainian art who has worked as curator with Tetiana on more than one occasion, says, “Eva Gershuni is one of the most interesting female figures in actual Ukrainian art. I’ve always been impressed by her independence and creative stand. Gershuni’s art is most unpredictable and very motivated; it is extremely straightforward, stylish, professional, and the same time very naive; it is very psychologically pragmatic and very feminine. It is very childish and very adult.”
In 1998, she won a grant from the prestigious University of Saskatchewan and the following year she was offered a teaching job at the University of Painting. During the three years of on-the-job training, she appeared in three exhibits at Saskatoon’s Gordon Snelgrove Gallery. It was there that she together with Risa Horowitz demonstrated the Out video project. In 2000, Eva summed up her stay at the university by staging the project Pause (personally she knew it as New Music, in commemoration of the favorite title song by Zhanna Aguzarova).
After receiving the degree of Master of Fine Arts, Tetiana has taught drawing at Sheridan Arts College (founded by Walt Disney’s colleagues). There she also heads the department of the fundamentals of the fine arts.
She does not plan to return to Ukraine and getting in touch with her in Canada is not easy, because she is often busy working on Northern Lights, her new large- scale nonfigurative art project. The Kyiv display will be her first public exposition here after leaving Ukraine.
