A Story About Creating Exhibitions In A Frontline City In Ukraine

You know me as the artist Oleksandra Malyshko, and today I want to tell you about my activities at this time. It was unexpected for me that I had to organize exhibitions of paintings by other artists. Unexpectedly, I became an art curator during the war. it was an interesting experience.

I am not the only artist in my family. You may have already read in other blog articles that I come from an artistic dynasty that included sculptors, icon painters, and contemporary artists. Each of them has their own handwriting and style. Everyone conducts their own personal creative searches and realizes themselves in art. My relatives were scattered all over the world during the war. I was left almost alone in a frontline city. The paintings of my sister, the artist Galyna Shevtsova, were moved to my apartment. Before the war, we gave up our creative workshop. We had to do something further. I began to communicate with various business owners where it was possible to hold an art exhibition. It’s not about financing or any other help. My proposal was to hold the exhibition in a new location.

Museums are closed because of the danger. Therefore, we need to find other solutions that are relevant to the present, while obeying the changes. Before the war, we used to have small galleries combined with coffee shops and clubs, so I approached the managers of these establishments. I would like to note that not everyone is ready to combine their activities with art. The vast majority believe that art is not a necessary thing. And this fact is too depressing because we exist, but nobody needs us. This is the opinion of the vast majority of my fellow artists.

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Ukrainian artists have never had state support. They have always been self-sufficient. Another depressing fact is that even nowadays artists are being exploited in different ways. Businessmen collect paintings from artists and sell them at auctions, where the slogan is charity. After that, no one provides information about the fate of the painting and what kind of charity the proceeds from the sale of the paintings were used for. It is impossible to understand whether the funds are actually used for charity or end up in other people’s pockets. After that, the artist does not receive a single penny of profit. Almost all my colleagues have such a difficult fate. So for me, creating exhibitions and managing them became more of a necessity than a desire. After all, I am an artist, not an art manager or curator.

During these last years of war on the territory of my country, I created five artist exhibitions by Galina Shevtsova and my own. These were different locations and different topics of study. My friends and family joined me in organizing the event and preparing the exhibition. I developed the image and theme of the exhibition, and the list of invited persons, and created a lot of documents that were informative for the artist, the viewer of the exhibition, and the administration of the premises. I also created labels for the coded paintings, and small informational stickers with information about the author and the painting.

We had to think about the exposition and the mounting of the paintings because the premises are rarely designed for exhibitions, even if the owners had envisioned a gallery. They had never thought about mounting the paintings. One of the funny moments I had in my practice was when they dismantled the ceiling and attached ropes to the brackets that held the ceiling tiles, then covered everything with tiles again. Another funny story is when I came to dismantle my personal exhibition and found that my paintings had been glued to the walls with a glue gun. It was almost impossible to tear them off the walls. When I was more persistent, the paintings were dismantled along with pieces of primer and cement from the wall. After that, the walls looked like they had been shelled. The owners of the premises explained this incident by saying that they did not like the paintings to hang in space when they opened the windows. So they used glue.

One of the interesting cases is the exhibition of Galina Shevtsova, which is located in another country. This exhibition was called “Walking on Strange Roads” and was organized by me in June 2022. I realize that without the help and support of friends, there would not have been such interesting events as I managed to create and I am infinitely grateful to everyone involved. So, during the aforementioned exhibition, I was able to create a live broadcast with the artist Halyna Shevtsova, who was in Warsaw. She was able to communicate with her guests.

I remember telling her that she was talking online from our past to the future. Since there is an hour difference between countries and we have overcome the resistance of time.

If you are interested in the paintings in the photo, you can easily write to me and I will connect you with the artist. You can also write to the artist directly via social networks.

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