Sasha Kurmaz

The title of The Chronicle of Current Events by Sasha Kurmaz refers to the eponymous Soviet civil rights bulletin that circulated through samizdat. Kurmaz presents a total installation richly saturated with various media and allusions. When entering the space, the viewer is confronted with the statement “Your sacrifice was in vain,” a result of the performance the artist organized on January 22, 2018, in an abandoned cemetery in Kyiv. The exposition develops through political and socio-cultural juxtapositions.

The hall showcases the photographic series 12 Months: the 12 works reflect the monthly chronology of losses of Ukrainian military in Eastern Ukraine over the course of 2017. The series coexists with a photograph of the destroyed composition entitled Communism Is Our Goal on the wall of a school in the village of Volodkova Divytsia (formerly Chervoni Partyzany) in the Chernihiv Region, a four-channel video collage State of Emergency, cut from created and found footage, and the looped video I No Longer Dream.

Alongside these, the exposition features the print run of the book Heaven, which documents the city’s nightlife: against the backdrop of political and economic crisis, techno and house parties might be the only space in Kyiv that has the potential to unite the youth regardless of their ethnicity or political orientation. Rave becomes an alternative world in which people develop new types of relations while simultaneously calling for peace.