Looking into the Gaps ІІ Exhibition

Looking into the Gaps is an exhibition project in progress. The display, spanning the spaces of Artsvit Gallery and DCCC, continues the exhibition held at Voloshyn Gallery in Kyiv from June to July 2024. This planned exhibition cycle is dedicated to the theme of ruptures in linear historical narratives and the search for alternative connections that unite Ukrainian art into a shared field of experience. The central motif of the second chapter of the cycle is landscape, terrain, territory, and biotope. War, landscape, and art exist in this exhibition in a state of active interpenetration.

Looking into the Gaps II also includes two "exhibitions within the exhibition." The first, titled "Islands of the Fragile," focuses on forms of sensitivity that do not align with the wartime-born culture of “resilience,” yet still exist within the reality transformed by war, enriching and complicating it. The second, "The Mitten Fairy Tale," views the Artsvit Gallery’s collection as a densely populated "artistic landscape," whose outer boundaries compress and condense a wide range of artistic phenomena, making their internal relationships more multidimensional. A number of artworks from outside the collection are presented here as responses to its underlying motifs.

From the curator:

‘We generally didn't like to look into the distance. Rather, to the side, into the gap. Like the perspective of pretty streets that always diverge perpendicularly. We didn't interpret, we didn't even ‘practice’, we just wandered around.’ — Yuri Leiderman, “Those Who Wandered in the Surf”*

The history of Ukrainian art is a torn history and, at the same time, a history of gaps. Interrupted narratives, destroyed works, repressed authors, loud silence, rewriting the past according to the new dominant ideology, tragedies of conformism and virtuosity of self-justification, breaking oneself over the knee, changing sides in the middle of an argument, changing names halfway through, dissociative identity. Or martyrdom through self-immolation, followed by turning the ashes into bronze. And bronze is known to steal the meaning from ashes every time.

Is it possible to wander the landscape of catastrophe? Are there flankers in the bloody lands? The answer to this exhibition is affirmative.

The dignity of living on the periphery, without an eager gaze directed to the centre, to the metropolis. The lack of any certainty about one's own historical prospects. Leiderman speaks of ‘Ukrainian horizontal kinship, non-hierarchical ties’ and ‘a number of cultural provinces - Kyiv, Odesa, Lviv, Kharkiv - that do not need a centre, they just stand side by side’**. Art in the provinces can be ‘elusive Joe’ while in the metropolis it turns into career springboards or monumental columns and towers of ‘big culture’.

But the province is also the cradle of madness. Ideas that in more central places could turn into unshakable pedestals for their creators here become the clamorous garb of a urban madmen. Something like Tetianych's spacesuits made of garbage and foil.

Let's imagine a museum, one of the Ukrainian museums, where a seemingly chaotic collection of artworks turns into a clear history of gaps of the logics that could otherwise unite and historicise these works. Where the lack of connection between historical situations makes the present fluid, unreliable and extremely open.

What to do when your native periphery suddenly becomes a place where the fate of the world is decided? And an even more complicated question: what if it suddenly ceases to be this place?

This exhibition is about the ways of looking at art, determined by the terrific and funny circumstances of Ukrainian life. This exhibition can be read as a project of a museum in which the desire to claim power through writing history has already failed. Or as an unstable system in which “classical," “contemporary," “marginal," "popular" authors find themselves outside their usual niches and positions in the classification. Like a moving landscape of art that instantly makes any map obsolete. Or as a story about the stolen past, recreated by its shadows and echoes - with full readiness for these shadows and echoes to deceive you and lead you astray.

Nikita Kadan

Duration: June 26 — September 20, 2025. Location: Artsvit Gallery and the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture, 21a Krutohirnyi Descent, Dnipro. Entrance through the glass door from the side of Uspenska Square.

Free entry.

Curated by: Nikita Kadan

Participants: Kateryna Aliinyk, Pavlo Bedzir, Yevheniia Belorusets, Pavlo Makov, Kateryna Lysovenko, Sviatoslav Bozhii, Oleh Voloshynov, Volodymyr Vorotniov, Daniil Galkin, Kseniia Hnylytska, Oleh Holosii, Zheka Holubientsev, Ania Dovhan, Halyna Domnenko, Pavlo Dubinin, Yurii Yehorov, Olia Yeremieieva, Serhii Yerzhykovskyi, Kateryna Yermolaieva, Viktor Zaretskyi, Halyna Zoria, Yurii Izdryk, Dana Kavelina, Nikita Kadan, Zhanna Kadyrova, Heorhii Kazakov, Stepan Kyrychenko, Alina Kleitman, Yurii Kovalenko, Katia Kopeikina, Henrietta Levytska, Volodymyr Levchenko, Yurii Leiderman, Yevhen Leshchenko, Anatolii Lymariev, Viktor Maryniuk, Krystyna Melnyk, Vasyl Myronenko, Lada Nakonechna, Halyna Neledva, Maia Nikolaieva, Nataliia Oliferovych, Parfion (Oleh Parfonov), Oleh Perkovskyi, Marharyta Polovinko, Taras Prokhasko and Oleh Hnativ, Kyrylo Protsenko, Vlada Ralko, Yevhenii Rakhmanin, Andrii Rachynskyi and Daniil Revkovskyi, Andrii Sahaidakovskyi, Anton Saienko, Yevhen Samborskyi, Karina Synytsia, Marta Syrko, Petro Sytnyk, Oleh Sokolov, Bohdan Sokur, Yurii Solomko, Fedir Tetianych, Ivan Tykhyi, Illia Todurkin, Kateryna Turenko and Anna Nykytiuk, Oleksandr Freidyn, Lesia Khomenko, Volodymyr Tsiupko, Dasha Chechushkova, Arkadii Chychkan, Davyd Chychkan, Sana Shakhmuradova Tanska, Myroslav Yahoda, Unknown authors.

Attention: the exhibition contains sensitive content: nudity, war scenes, and the aftermath of hostilities.

The exhibition project “Looking into the Gaps” was initiated by Voloshyn Gallery in 2024. The exhibition was realized in cooperation with Voloshyn Gallery (Kyiv) and Assortment Room (Ivano-Frankivsk) at Artsvit Gallery and the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture.

The exhibition presents works from the collections of Artsvit Gallery, Pavlo Martynov, Voloshyn Gallery, Nikita Kadan and the Estate of Oleg Golosiy and TheNakedRoom Gallery.

* ** The text by Yuri Leiderman, “Those who walked in the surf” (“Шлявшиеся в прибое”, 2017) is available in the gallery in Ukrainian translation by Mirek Bodnar and in the original Russian via QR-code in Prostory.