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ART PROSPECT INTENSIVE

IN SOCIALLY ENGAGED ART

7.10–27.10

ODESA–CHISINAU

The Art Prospect Intensive supports the exchange of expertise and development of innovative methods to facilitate collaboration between artists, social organizations, and the community to address local problems and issues. The program includes intensive seminars by experienced international artists and curators in the field of social practice art as well as practical workshops resulting in collaborative projects in partnership with social organizations, initiatives and cultural institutions in Odesa. 

The program focuses on theory and practice. The theoretical component includes seminars and workshops led by experienced international artists and curators as well as site visits and meetings with activists, researchers and social and arts organizations, creatively addressing socio-political issues and engaging local communities in Odesa and Chisinau. During the two-week practical component in Odesa, project participants, under the supervision of international experts, will conduct collaborative projects with local organizations focusing on some of the themes below. 
 

Art Prospect Intensive Topics

 

1. Beyond Museum Walls: how museums expand beyond their institutional buildings and transform audience members into participants; how artists can become a part of this process and help museums more effectively communicate with the public and strengthen the role of the museum in urban development.

 

2. City Facades: how artists investigate the city environment and architecture, work with perceptions of architectural heritage and issues of contemporary urban development, and address the question of what cities and their residents remember and forget. 

3. Good-neighborliness: how artists transform public spaces and work with city residents to build a sense of community and encourage good-neighborliness and social responsibility.

4. Collaboration and collectiveness: how artists work together with organizations and local communities to stimulate change and build a universal conversational tool to strengthen civic engagement.

Art Prospect Intensive Organizers: CEC ArtsLink in a collaboration with Open Place Platform for Interdisciplinary Practice (Kyiv, Ukraine) and Oberliht Association (Chisinau, Moldova).

Partners: Impact Hub Odesa, Urban Institute Initiative, Dvor-Scena Initiative, Bleschunov Odesa Municipal Museum of Personal Collections, Odessa Fine Arts MuseumZpațiu / Zpace, Apriori Association / Club 19.

 

EXPERTS

 

Muratbek Djumaliev

Muratbek Djumaliev is a contemporary artist and curator based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. He is the co-curator of the ArtEast School for Contemporary Art. His creative work explores the influence of the neo-liberal paradigm in the post-Soviet context.

Anna Harsanyi

Anna Harsanyi is a curator, arts manager and educator. Her participatory projects and exhibitions have taken place within public and alternative spaces, exploring themes of memory, cultural identity, and collective experience.

Harsanyi is the co-curator of In the Historical Present, an exhibition marking The New School's centennial which features commissioned projects exploring the often hidden or dormant histories within the institution. She recently completed a project presenting artist engagements with the historic Essex Street Market in New York's Lower East Side. In 2016, she collaborated with Sheetal Prajapati on Game Night, a series of events centered around play. She co-curated Hot & Cold: Revolution in the Present Tense, a public art project in Timișoara and Cluj, Romania which presented three artist projects about the 25th anniversary of the revolution that ended communism. In 2014, she was part of the team of curators who organized No Longer Empty's exhibition Through the Parlor in a former beauty salon. 

Most recently, Harsanyi worked as the project manager for the Guggenheim Social Practice Initiative at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and she currently teaches at The New School.

Kendal Henry

Kendal Henry is an artist and curator who lives in New York City and has specialized in the field of public art for over twenty-five years. He illustrates that public art can be used as a tool for social engagement, civic pride and economic development through the projects and programs he has initiated in the US, Europe, Russia, Asia, Central Asia, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and the Caribbean. Henry believes that the most successful public artworks start with the question “what is the artwork to achieve?” and take into account the audience and surrounding environment in the creation of that artwork. 

Henry is currently the Director of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art Program and an adjunct professor at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. He is a guest lecturer at various universities and educational institutions including the Abbey Mural Workshop at the National Academy Museum & School of Fine Arts; Rhode Island School of Design Senior Studio; and Pratt Institute’s Arts and Cultural Management Program. Prior to that, he served as Manager of Arts Programs at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for eleven years, overseeing the commissioning, fabrication, and installation of MTA’s permanent art projects and producing temporary exhibitions at Grand Central Terminal.

Alevtina Kakhidze

Based in Muzychi, Ukraine, 26 kilometers from the city capital of Kyiv, Alevtina Kakhidze is a conceptual artist who works with ideas of consumption, gender and power. Having grown up in the Donetsk region of Ukraine (known for coal mining), she has experienced Ukraine’s abrupt and chaotic changes from the days of the USSR to the unstable post-Soviet environment, including the undeclared war between Russia and Ukraine that it is going on today.

 

Kakhidze attended the National Academy of Fine Art and Architecture in Kyiv (1999–2004) and the Jan van Eyck Academy in the Netherlands (2004–2005). She has been the United Nations Tolerance Envoy in Ukraine since 2018, and was the Kazimir Malevich Artist Award winner in 2008 and the first prize winner in the Competition for Young Curators and Artists at the CSM/Foundation Centre for Contemporary Art, Kyiv, in 2002.

Anna Karpenko

Anna Karpenko is a Minsk-based independent curator and researcher who focuses on socially engaged art. Karpenko graduated from the Belarusian State University with a bachelor’s in Philosophy, the masters’ program in Visual Culture at the European Humanities University (Vilnius), and the Berlin Art Institute internship program. As a researcher, Anna works on the topic of the unknown Belarusian avant-garde, as well as “outsider art” and critical curation. 


As a curator, Karpenko has produced numerous exhibitions on inclusion in art—Imena (Names), co-curated with Antonina Stebur, Biazmezhniki (People Without Limits), co-curated with Sophia Sadouskaya—as well as educational activities: the parallel program for Slavs and Tatars’ exhibition in Minsk, the MATCH project (in partnership with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute), and public lectures on Belarusian art scene (together with Alicija Jelinska and Mikolai Robert Jurkowski). In 2018, together with a group of colleagues, Karpenko launched the “A Good Lady To Have around the House” campaign that raised the issue of unequal working conditions for women in the culture industry.

Dana Kosmina

Dana Kosmina is an independent architect, researcher and artist. She currently lives and works in Kyiv, where she was born in 1990. In 2013, Kosmina graduated from the Department of Architecture at the Kiev National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture. In 2013, she won a scholarship from the French Embassy to study at the Nantes School of Architecture, receiving her master’s in Architecture in 2015.

 

Kosmina is a cofounder of Pylorama, an open collective for urban interventions. Since 2016, she has been a member of the artist-run initiative DE NE DE, and in 2017, she joined the curatorial group Hudrada. In 2019, she joined the editorial board of Prostory, an online publication that covers a range of fields including literature, social criticism, and modern art. Her projects have been featured in group exhibitions at the Mystetskiy Arsenal, M17 Contemporary Art Center, the parallel programs of Manifesta 10 and the IV Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and the Visual Culture Research Center.

Yuriy Kruchak

Yuriy Kruchak is an artist and curator based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Born in Poltava, Ukraine, he attended the Kharkiv Art Industrial institute (1991–1996) and the National Academy of Fine Art and Architecture in Kyiv (1996–1999).

 

Kruchak works at the border between art and social studies. His artistic strategies depend on the problem at hand and usually draw different communities into the creative process. Kruchak’s public works transform the audience into the actors, creating a community whose behavior and interactions serve to interpret and reveal urban social structures. His work often addresses the relationship of art to reality, and always addresses the relationship of the artist to the audience.

 

Together with Yulia Kostereva, Yuriy Kruchak is the founder of the artist-run space Open Place in Kyiv, Ukraine. The space aims to support creative research and reinvigorate the links between the art process and different layers of modern society.

Cyrill Lipatov

Cyrill Lipatov is a historian and anthropologist based in Odesa, Ukraine. In 2004, he graduated from I. I. Mechnikov National University with a master’s in Historical Studies, and in 2005, from the Central European University, Budapest (master’s in Sociology and Social Anthropology). He has interned at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (St. Petersburg, Russia), Uniwersytet Jagielloński (Krakow, Poland), I. I. Mechnikov National University (Odesa, Ukraine), Uzhhorod National University (Uzhhorod, Ukraine), and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Berlin, Germany).

Lipatov has worked as a senior lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Ethnology of Ukraine at I. I. Mechnikov National University, director of the anti-cafe Ziferblat, director of the independent movie theater Inoteatr, and program director of the learning community 4City. Since 2015, he has been the program research curator at Urban Inst. In 2019, he joined the team of the Odesa Fine Arts Museum, where he works as head of the Research Department.

Anton Polsky (Make)

Anton Polsky (Make) was born in Moscow in 1982. He has been making street art since the late 90s, moving from traditional graffiti to experimental practices at the intersection of street art, art activism and dialogue art. Polsky is a cofounder and editor of the site Partizaning.org. He graduated from the Russian State University for the Humanities with a bachelor’s degree in Art History and has taught the history of street art and urban studies there for the past three years. He enrolled in the masters’ program at the European University in Saint Petersburg, where he studied queer theory and urban studies. He is working on a thesis about Russian street art, as well as studying relational art practices in the post-Soviet space. For the last few years, Polsky has collaborated with his wife Natalia Sinitsina and worked on research, teaching, and urban art projects meant to cultivate engagement the environment, people, and, occasionally, animals.

Natalia Sinitsina (Emmy)

Natalia Sinitsina (Emmy) was born in Siberia in 1994. In 2013, she studied at Mr. Pejo’s street theater, which promotes dynamic interaction with the viewer. In 2017, she took a course on directing at the Moscow School of New Cinema. She is the cofounder of the Art.Kitchen project at the Typography Center for Contemporary Art in Krasnodar (later located in Kolomna and Kazan), which centered on collective cooking and discussions about art and society. She was a resident at M-cult in the Maunula neighborhood of Helsinki, where, together with Anton Polsky and artists and students at Aalto University, and with a little help from local residents, she published a neighborhood newspaper, Muumion sanomat (Mummy News), dedicated to the residents of this suburban neighborhood. Lately, she has been writing autobiographical stories, travelling, and studying libraries and communal lifestyles in art centers, residencies, hostels, and communes.

Stanislav Turina

Stanislav Turina was born in Makiivka (near Donetsk) in 1988 and grew up in the city of Mukachevo in Western Ukraine. He graduated from the Lviv National Academy of Arts, where he specialized in glass art. Since 2018, he has been based in Kyiv (Sofiyivska Borshchahivka). His work deals with memory and sentiment, self-reflection, and the ties between people and the world around them or just with the situation. He works in atmospheric installations, personal epistles, paraphrases, and sketchbook studies.

Turina is a cofounder of ZKD Collective (2005). He is involved in the artist-run initiatives BlackCircleFestival, Detenpyla Gallery (Lviv), Efremova 26 Gallery (2013, Lviv), Open Group (as a cofounder, from 2012 to 2019), and in Korydor Gallery (Uzhhorod). He has participated in the Venice Biennale three times. His works are in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kherson, the Mail Art Museum (Lviv), the Velikoanadolsk Forest Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Mukachevo), the Sergei Prokovfiev Memorial Museum (Sontsivka), the Bukhanchuk Museum of Fine Arts in Kmytiv, Labyrinth Gallery (Lublin), and in private collections in Ukraine, Italy, Poland, Russia, and Kazakhstan. Currently, he is working as an unofficial collector (together with Petro Ryaska and Attila Gazhlinski) for a future museum of contemporary art in the city of Mukachevo. He is also working on creating a studio for artists and writers with Down syndrome in Kyiv.

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PA​RTICIPANTS

Ganna Anufriieva

Ganna Anufriieva is an Odesa-based artist. In 2012, she graduated from Grekov Art School (specializing in painting), and in 2015, she graduated from the Lviv National Academy of Arts, where she studied monumental painting. Her work has been featured in shows in Ukraine and abroad. In 2017, she took part in the School of Performance in Lviv, and in 2018, she joined the Kyiv art collective Hlebzawod. In 2018, she began work on the urban art project Vodoyma (Ukrainian for “body of water”). In 2019, she participated in the first Culture of Neighborliness School in Odesa.

Natasha Chychasova

Natasha Chychasova is an independent curator, cultural manager, and researcher who works mainly in the field of contemporary art with the themes of historical memory, the internal dynamics of artistic communities, institutional critique, and art education. In 2018, she graduated from the master’s program in Art History at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.


As a curator, she works with topics including rethinking the Soviet legacy (the show City Without An Appointment at ArtSvit Gallery, Dnipro), personal narratives (the project Suitcases Of Crimean Human Rights Defenders), and the problems of local communities (the project Finally, We Are Here on Ukrainian migrant workers at Miejski Ośrodek Sztuki, Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland). In 2017, Chychasova worked as a curatorial assistant for the Festival of Young Artists at the Mystetsky Arsenal. For a year and a half, she was a project manager and coordinator of the public program at the IZOLYATSIA Platform for Cultural Initiatives. Currently, together with Anastasia Tsissar, she is working on a project as part of the Insha Osvita Living History Studios program, drawing on interviews with Kharkiv artists to prepare a publication preserving the memory of the old downtown studios that historically anchored the city’s art scene.

Ashot Danielyan

Ashot Danielyan is a poet, rock musician, writer, and the curator of various art projects. He graduated from the Tashkent State Institute of Oriental Studies in 2006, studying Japanese Language and Literature. His senior thesis dealt with the work of Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Since 2006, he has been the front man and lyricist for the Tashkent-based rock band Origami Wings and participated in local and international festivals.

 

Danielyan is the author of editorials on local history (Japanese, Australian, and Central Asian), as well as the winner of the international literary competition Novellasia 2016.

 

For the last several years, he has collaborated closely with the Goethe Institute Tashkent on projects including Poetry Slam (as a several-time finalist and member of the jury) and Converter (as the author of articles on contemporary youth problems).

In 2007, he became the founder and coproducer of Uzbekistan’s only established independent rock festival, Ilkhom Rock Fest, which takes place in a theater space.

 

Danielyan is an art activist and the creator and producer of the multidisciplinary project Man with a Stool, which is dedicated to developing young creatives and supporting local art communities in Uzbekistan.

Zulya Esentaeva

Zulya Esentaeva is a Bishkek-based artist and student at the ArtEast School of Contemporary Art.

She is involved in individual and collective multi-media practices that explore nature-human interactions

in the age of the Capitalocene by re-locating them into an imaginary past or future.

Armenak Grigoryan

Armenak Grigoryan is an artist, art historian, and curator. His preliminary art education took place at the Hakob Kojoyan Art Educational Complex (1997–2002). In 2008, he received his bachelor’s degree from the State Academy of Fine Arts in Yerevan, and in 2011, his master’s. From 2009 to 2010, he studied Designing and Implementing a Cultural Program at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Yerevan.

As a final project for the program in 2010, Grigoryan helped to coordinate an international festival, held in Ijevan, called Encounters on the Border. Since then, Grigoryan has worked as an assistant curator and consultant for the exhibitions The Artist of Translation: Vigen Tadevosyan (2015), Fixations (2015), and What Is Hamasteghtsakan Art? (2016). In 2017, he curated the Annual Festival of Alternative Art at the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art. 

Grigoryan’s works have been featured in group shows such as The Sun of the Sleepless (2018), Gyumri Living Art (Gallery25, Gyumri/Yerevan, 2014), the 8th Gyumri International Biennial (2012), and Armenian Threads (Manchester, 2013), a two-person show with Sarah Greaves. In 2010, he won second place in the Goethe Institute’s Space to Space public art competition.

Oksana Kapishnikova

Oksana Kapishnikova is a curator, researcher, and art manager. She holds a master’s degree in Applied Cultural Studies from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Since February 2019, she has been working as the Senior Researcher in the Educational Department at the Gapar Aitiev Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts. 

Kapishnikova has been curating exhibitions in the field of contemporary art since 2010. Among her projects are the feminist exhibition and discussion program Tomorrow: Sketches of Your and My History (2016, co-curator); the research-based exhibition Art and Emancipation: O. Manuilova and Her Contemporaries (2015, co-curator), and On, Off, the First Central Asian Youth Project of Contemporary Art (2010, head curator). 

Kapishnikova has participated in regional and international contemporary art programs, including capacity-building programs for Kyrgyz museums at the Center for Museum Initiatives (2016); the Third Moscow Curatorial Summer School (2013); and the Art and Production scholarship program organized by the School of Theory and Activism, Bishkek (2013).

She has been a member of ICOM since 2016. In 2019, she became the Executive Secretary of ICOM Kyrgyzstan.

Alexandra Novak

Alexandra Novak was born in Ukraine, grew up in southern Moldova, and now lives in Transnistria, where she studies and practices photography, design, project-based work, and street art. In college, Novak studied Applied Arts and Handicrafts and earned a teaching certification. Currently, aside from being an artist and an activist, she is also the mother of a dinosaur fanatic.

In 2016, she had a solo show, Color Silhouette, and in 2017, a solo public project, Street Photographer: Transnistria (meant to bring city residents together in an alternative space). In 2018, Novak completed the photo project Being Yourself (a collaboration with the Czech human rights organization People in Need). That same year she carried out the project Your Birthright on children’s rights, quoting from the Convention on the Rights of the Child in public with visual accompaniment. For the past two years, Novak has collaborated with the Oberliht association and engaged with public space and the local community. In 2019, she worked to introduce street art to the city of Rîbnița (working with the city administration) and prepared a series of workshops for artists and enthusiastic young people.

Aigerim Ospanova

Aigerim Ospanova is a multimedia artist who works with urban space and society and studies the interrelationship between the two through her artistic practice. She draws on her own story to demonstrate how people respond to a change of scenery.

As part of her Astana Art Show residency, Ospanova made interventions throughout Astana, focusing on transformations in the definition of hospitality shaped by urbanization and on how culturally established human relations change in urban contexts. Since 2018, she has been working on developing neighbourly relations between courtyard residents and building a constructive dialogue between them and business. Ospanova manages the Korshiler project, which is being implemented in the new districts of Astana. Korshiler serves as a platform for improving relations between neighbors, provides them with an opportunity to find like-minded people and form communities, and allows for continued engagement with other urban communities and businesses.

Alexey Rumyantsev

Alexey Rumyantsev is an artist and activist who has been involved in contemporary art projects since 2006. He works in the genres of video art, installation, public art, and new media. His art investigates ongoing political processes in the Central Asian region, changes in the status of public space, the level of self-censorship in Central Asia, and interpretations of “national identity.”

Qafar Rzayev

Qafar Rzayev resides in Ganja, Azerbaijan, where he was born in 1993. After two years of undergraduate studies at Ganja State University, he quit school to devote his time and energy to art. His street art and graffiti work started appearing on the walls of the city of Ganja in 2016; besides that, Qafar also works in painting, conceptual art, and graphic design.

Qafar explores the artistic dimensions of shabaka, an Azerbaijani national ornament, and researches the archeomodern nature of Azerbaijani culture and society. His works have been featured in solo shows in Spain and Greece, as well as in group exhibitions. Recently, his art has started to involve people and communities, exploring the role of the artist as a “messenger” between museum and community.

Sophia Sadovskaya

Sophia Sadovskaya is an independent curator, art manager, and art educator based in Minsk, Belarus. She curates the Environmental Visual Audial Art project (2012–present), which integrates practices of environmental activism and contemporary art.


Sadovskaya’s main project during the last year has been the exhibition and research project People Without Limits, co-curated with Anna Karpenko and devoted to an alternative perspective on contemporary art, focusing on artists not included in the discourse of contemporary Belarusian art. During the last two years, Sadovskaya has curated the educational program for many exhibitions at Ў Gallery of Contemporary Art, including Without Exceptions, Zbor, and Movaland. She is the coauthor of Belarusian Art of the 20th Century, a series of children's books.

Nadya Sayapina

Nadya Sayapina is an artist who works in painting, performance, mixed media, installations, and land art. Born in 1989 in Minsk, Belarus, she received her bachelor’s in Applied Arts from the Belarusian State University of Culture and Arts in 2011 and her master’s in Art History from the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus in 2012. She studies art education and techniques for facilitating dialogue through work with associative perceptions of heroes, context, performative practices, and processuality.

Oleksii Salmanov

Oleksii Salmanov is a Kyiv- and Odesa-based artist. Born in 1976, he studied law at the International Solomon University in Kyiv. After graduating in 1998, he worked as a lawyer for several organizations until 2003. He began his career as an artist in 2008.

Salmanov is the winner of the 2009 Pinchuk Art Centre Special Prize for young Ukrainian artists. He has no formal art schooling, but the prize allowed him to complete an internship at Olafur Eliasson's studio in Berlin in 2010.

Salmanov works in various media, including photography, video, sculpture and installations, site-specific and street art, and performance. He has participated in exhibitions, residencies and other projects in Ukraine and abroad.

Mikheil Sulakauri

Mikheil Sulakauri is an artist working in different mediums in order to echo his surroundings and environment. Since finishing school, he has focused on self-education and tried to create a modern artistic language based on Georgian traditions and culture.

In 2012, he made his debut on the Georgian art scene with the street art project LAMB. Aside from making art for public and gallery spaces, he is currently trying his hand as a designer for animation studios. Sulakauri’s beloved city of Tbilisi, with all its residents and ongoing issues, is the biggest canvas for his art.

Bogdana Voitenko

Bogdana Voitenko is a Ukrainian psychologist and educator who has lived in the US, Canada, and the Russian Federation. For last three years, she has worked in museum education in Kyiv, Ukraine, developing programs for the National Center of Folk Culture (Ivan Honchar Museum), the Taras Shevchenko National Museum, and Pinchuk Art Center. Voitenko works primarily with children, helping young visitors to engage with different topics and prompting them to get to know each other better in order to develop their emotional and communicative intelligence. Her work invites participants to consider themes such as acceptance, tolerance, identity, and ecology, using art as an instrument to reveal and deepen viewers’ personal qualities. 

Voitenko has participated in cultural exchanges including the Ukrainian-German encounter “Living Monuments: Commemorative Spaces Between Removal and Re-invention” (2018), where participants analyzed how monuments influence the social environment and what claims they represent, culminating in a one-day exhibition at the Neurotitan Gallery in Berlin. She coordinated the children’s program for the second Festival of Living History in Kyiv (hosted by the NGO Insha Osvita), incorporating all their artwork into a collective magazine.

Olga Zovskaya

Olga Zovskaya is an artist originally from Russia who has lived and worked in Kyiv, Ukraine since 2015. She studied at the Ural State Academy of Architecture and Arts in Yekaterinburg, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Moscow, the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts and the Viadrinicum Summer School in Frankfurt (Oder).

 

Zovskaya initiated and organized the project Within Space in Yekaterinburg in 2014 and has taken part in numerous projects and shows in Armenia, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, the US, and elsewhere. Her writing on the current challenges of urban space has been published in the architectural magazine Tatlin.


As an artist with an architectural background, Zovskaya mostly works at the intersection of art and architecture. In her latest projects, she focuses on the memory of place, community engagement, and the relationship of the people to the place they inhabit, its space, and architecture. In particular, she is interested in ways in which the post-Soviet city reflects and reveals underlying political, economic, and social processes through its space, and in how it bears witness to the past and the current condition of society. She pays special attention to the fate of Soviet public spaces and monumental art.

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