The PinchukArtCentre presents the 11th PAC-UA project, an exhibition by the Ukrainian artist Sasha Kurmaz “The marble angels with bows were shaking in shadows their small penises, bending their bows and carelessly laughed at death”. The show was created especially for the PinchukArtCentre in the context of the Research Platform, which is an open platform for thinking, research and discourse, that aims to generate a living archive of Ukrainian Art from the early 80ties till present. The exhibition addresses the restriction of the “image” and questions, where the boundary between permitted and forbidden lies and aims to answer who takes responsibility for implementing those limitations.
This work discovers the possibilities of art; whether its language can be completely free of the influence of the society it is shown and created in; if the art is defined by the constraints of traditions, public taste, religion, politics and law. These societal areas often impose more limitations and interdiction on art rather than protect its fundamental freedom of thought and expression.
For the exhibition, the artist created an installation that comprises a performance and a showcase with visual materials. The visual ‘entrails’ relate to different forms of ban including traditions, aggression, institutional (self)-censoring, vandalism, law and political bias. The performance is a durational obstacle, a metaphor for social and political morals imposed on society as a whole.
The exhibition draws upon a joint work of Sasha Kurmaz and artists’ collective Masoch Fund. The project failed due to legal issues. It became an impulse to reflect upon the limitations that art undergoes.
The title of the exhibition is taken from the book The Woman of His Dream by the Ukrainian writer Oles Ulyanenko (1962–2010) that was censored in 2009 by the National Commission on Issues of Morality and the book’s circulation was seized.
Curator: Tatiana Kochubinska
The show is open on the 4th floor in the PAC-UA space from December 22, 2016 till January 15, 2017. Admission is free.
Working hours:
1. tue - fri : 17.30 - 20.30
2. sat - sun: 12.00 - 21.00
PAC-UA is a special program line to present new produced works of Ukrainian artists embedded in the context of the Research Platform, aiming to research ongoing artistic processes within the country and support strong and long-term collaboration between the PinchukArtCentre and the artists. With its project, PinchukArtCentre presents a dynamic and flexible program for Ukrainian artists that is showcased in the PAC-UA space for a period of one month. Since its launch in 2011, the exhibitions by Vasyl Tsagolov, Arsen Savadov, Oleksandr Roytburd, Iliya Chichkan, Mykola Matsenko, Pavlo Makov, Zhanna Kadyrova, Alexey Salmanov, Sergiy Bratkov, and Zinaїda Lihacheva were showcased at the PAC-UA.
Sasha Kurmaz was born in 1986 in Kyiv, Ukraine, where he lives and works today. Kurmaz holds a BFA in design from the National Academy of Managerial Staff of Culture and Arts in Kyiv. Sasha started his artistic practice as a graffiti artist. When he gradually left the medium behind, he kept public space as his main domain for the work. Kurmaz’s work is at once direct and open to interpretation. In most of his work he plays a game of de-powering power structures, using both humoristic and conceptual interventions. He was shortlisted for the PinchukArtCentre Prize in 2013.
For more information, please visit pinchukartcentre.org
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