What Remains, What Disappears
An evening of conversations with curators, artists, and researchers from Ukraine, hosted by Office Ukraine
A reflection on exhibition making amidst war, ways of practicing with at-risk institutional
archives, and the role of the artist as a witness. The program will feature a curatorial introduction to the exhibition projects
from the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture (DCCC) and Asortymentna Kimnata, Ivano-Frankivsk.
The program will feature a curatorial introduction to the exhibition projects from
the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture (DCCC) and Asortymentna Kimnata, Ivano-Frankivsk.
Everything
for Everybody
Conversation with the Curators of the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture
The first part of the evening addresses the theme of heritage under threat, the precariousness of archives, and the ways
in which artistic practice can resist destruction while fostering new forms of collective memory.
Curators Kateryna
Rusetska, Victoria Donovan, and Natasha Chychasova, together with colleagues from the Pokrovsk Historical Museum, Tetiana
Kostiuchenko and Anhelina Rozhkova, will discuss the research foundations of the exhibition “Everything for Everybody”, developed
for the Kyiv Biennale 2025 in collaboration with the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture (DCCC).
The exhibition
framework consists of archival sources from the Franki Raffles Photography Collection at the University of St Andrews, and
the photographic archive of Mykola Bilokon, preserved by the Pokrovsk Historical Museum. Raffles’s Soviet Women series documents
labor and gender across the late Soviet Union in 1989, while Bilokon’s photographs portray everyday life in Pokrovsk during
the collapse of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s early independence.
In 2024, Pokrovsk was destroyed by Russian bombs,
forcing the evacuation of the museum’s collections. The exhibition traces this story of fragility and displacement, bringing
Bilokon’s archive into dialogue with Raffles’s images to reflect on how we document and remember places that are endangered
or erased entirely.
Do Toads Sing in the Walls?
Conversation with Olga Poliak and Alona
Karavai, curators of Asortymentna Kimnata, Ivano-Frankivsk
The second conversation turns to “Do Toads Sing
in the Walls?”, a project developed by Asortymentna Kimnata in Ivano-Frankivsk, which established a dialogue between artists
serving on the frontline and those remaining in civilian contexts.
Curators Olga Poliak and Alona Karavai will
present the project through photographic documentation of exhibitions first realized in February 2025, alongside close readings
of selected works from the exhibition they brought to Vienna from Ivano-Frankivsk.
Guest speaker Klementyna Kvindt,
drone operator, poet, and ornithologist, will join via Zoom to share her reflections on displacement, resistance, and service
in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
The title comes from the song Evening of Toads by Stanislav Krul and colleagues,
written with the help of AI.
The evening will end with a live sound performance by Anton Lapov (Anton Makarevych),
a Ukrainian media artist, computer musician, and curator. Lapov is the coordinator of the media-art collective Art Cluster
R+N+D and founder of the digital record label BOCTOK.
About this programme
The programme
is initiated by Office Ukraine Vienna in collaboration with the Kyiv Biennale and Asortymentna Kimnata, with support from
ERSTE Foundation.
It will continue on 14 Nov at mumok Kino with a special screening program curated by the Dnipro
Center for Contemporary Culture and Asortymentna Kimnata.
Further information and links
More info about Kyiv Biennal
More
info about Asortymentna Kimnata
More info about Office Ukraine. Support
for Ukrainian Artists
©Franki Raffles, Women standing on sand with tools, Soviet Union, 1989
Veranstaltung
Discussion
13. November 2025, 18:00
Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien, Georg-Coch-Platz
2, Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab (AIL), 1010 Wien
