Arsenale-2012: Anti-utopias and golden lotus

The announcement was made at the capital’s Mystetsky Arsenal, which is going to be the central venue of the biennale. On the whole, the Arsenale will display around 250 works of 100 artists from different countries of the world, from Japan and Vietnam to New Zealand and the US. Forty works were created specifically for the exhibit. So, the patriarch of actual art, Japanese Yayoi Kusama will present her installation Footprints of Eternity and two new big canvases. Impressed by the building of Mystetsky Arsenal, Briton Phyllida Barlow created her three-part work Rift, which uses industrial elements. Our fellow countryman, Kharkiv-born photo artist Boris Mikhailov will contribute to the Arsenale with his new series of the photos of plants with giant architecture rising over solitary silhouettes of the employees.

Another Ukrainian, world-renowned conceptualist Ilya Kabakov (born in Dnipropetrovsk) will show his giant anti-utopian work Monument to a Lost Civilization. After a series of presentations in the world’s capitals a large-scale installation created by Ai Weiwei, Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, a series of 12 bronze heads depicting Chinese zodiac signs, inspired by the 18th century relics from Yasi-Resonse (Gardens of Perfect Clarity) in Beijing, will be brought to Kyiv. Indisputably, the audience won’t miss the film by the genius of video art Bill Viola, The Raft, installations of the French classic Louise Bourgeois, and American provocateur Paul McCarthy.

Apart from the main exhibit, with the assistance of the influential center of contemporary art Zamek Ujazdowski (Warsaw, Poland) there will be Double Game, a joint exposition of Polish and Ukrainian artists, which will include music and performances, besides the visual part. Within the framework of the project “Ancient forms: actual view” it is planned to place along the former ramparts of the Old Pechersk Fortress nearly hundred authentic museum monuments, archaic sculptures of stone babas (kurgan stelae) dated 3rd millennium B.C. – 12th century, which belong to the collections of several museums.

The parallel program of the biennial includes culture and artistic events, which will be held by Ukrainian artists and curators at different exhibition venues not only in Kyiv, but also in Kherson, Kharkiv, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk. The theoretic part will be provided by the discussion platform “Art after the apocalypse” (curator: Kateryna Degot); there also will be room for an education program designed for various audiences, from professionals in the sphere of art to children.

Arsenale-2012 will also have a thematic slogan “Best time, worst time. Renaissance and apocalypse in contemporary art” and will last till July 31. David Elliott is the curator of the entire project, whereas director general of the Mystetsky Arsenal Natalia Zabolotna is the commissar. The first action of Arsenale was the erection on Maidan Nezalezhnosti on April 7 a 10-meter-high sculpture of the golden lotus flower created by the Korean designer and artist Choi Jeong Hwa.