Ivan Trush konstnärskap är, enligt min mening, dock mycket mer intressant än som enbart en del i en ukrainsk nationalistisk rörelse. I hans fina ateljé finner man just prov hans bredd och fina öga för omgivningen. En av de serier som intresserar är hans resa till Egypten, Jordanien och Palestina. I hans målningar känner man nästan hur han bändas av ljuset. Jag upplever att hans nyfiken på människorna och landskapen känns genuin och ärligt.

Men den serie som intresserar mig mest är nog den som kallas Ensamhetsserien. Efter första världskriget hände något i Ivan Trush konstnärskap. Människorna försvann, och de idylliska målningarna från hans trädgård försvann. Även målningar av ukrainare i folkdräkter försvann. Plötsligt blev han intresserad av ensamma träd, eller buskar i ödsliga landskap. Vad hände med Trush under första världskriget? Varför slutade han tro på mänskligheten? Frågor som jag inte funnit svar på, men i min fantasi bygger jag vidare på vad Ivan Trush såg under första världskriget, men aldrig målade.

Från Ensamhetsserien

Min absoluta favorit är dock målningen ovan. Färgglada slingerkrasse som bryter av mot en gråbrun jord. En målning, som för mig, talar om allas rätt till olikhet. Den plats där någon växer och utvecklas, är kanske inte en efterlängtad plats för andra. Vi måste ändå tillåta varandra att vara olika och ändå se varandras skönhet. Något att minnas då världen känns alltmer likriktad.

Romanyshyns språk är lekfullt och inte översållat med symbolik, så som mycket konst är här. Hennes teknik är dessutom ofta lika intressant som själva motiven. Hon har bland annat jobbat med samma teknik som man använder för att göra ikoner, men hennes budskap är knappast religiöst utan fantasifullt och egensinnigt.

Romana Romanyshyn till vänster i bild.

Sedan min ankomst till Lviv är detta den absolut finaste och intressantaste utställningen jag sett. Romana Romanyshyns stil har tagit steget in i en europeisk kontext, och avståndet mellan Lvivs och ex. Berlins gallerier känns plötsligt inte så lång!

Die Geige / A Violin made by Yuri Kazakov in Poland (winter 2005)

A memorial movie made by Sasha Glyadelov, Tanya Hodakovskaya, Olga Komissar, Konstantin Petrov, Andrey Toloshny, Anya Sorokolet, Alisa Zdorovetskaya and many many more. Edited by: Andrey Toloshnyy and Tanya Hodakovskaya

Jag är van vid att konst kommunicerar med vår samtid – med kritik, ironi etc. Olga Kwasha gör inte det, vilket känns något förvirrande! För mig är konst inte bara något som ska försköna vår vardag utan även säga något om vår vardag, våra liv, våra öden. En kritisk udd hade enligt min mening höjt Olga Kwashas verk och kanske hade konstrasterna hjälpt till att skapa en narrtivitet, som jag nu känner att de saknar.

Å andra sidan ser jag att det inte är Olga Kwashas önskemål. Hon vill skapa en bild av en värld som inte finns, där drömmar och önskningar uppfylls, och där regn, snö, sol är en inramning till en harmonisk värld.

Själv ser jag därför särskilt framemot kvällens möte med Terje Hellesen på Kabinet, som då förhoppningsvis har letat sig fram till Lviv.

Mellan den 14 och 18 september inträffar Lvivs årliga bokmässa, Lviv Book Forum och Skandinaviska inslag återfinns i programtablån. Särskilt glädjande är det att kunna berätta om en nyutkommen diktsamling, 18 поетів із Гетеборга – 18 poeter från Göteborg. Översättningarna till ukrainska är gjorda av Lev Hrytsyuk och diktsamlingen kommer att presenteras under bokmässan. Bland de översatta poeterna återfinns Lina Ekdahl, Anna Mattsson, Johannes Anyuru, Ragnar Strömberg, Pamela Jaskoviak och m.fl. Diktsamlingen är utgiven av bokförlaget Krok.

Även Norge är representerat under bokmässan. Under bokmässan öppnar den norska utställningen Pripyat project – en utställning med foto (Børge Bjartmann Bjerk och Skjalg Ekeland) och poesi (Terje Hellesen) – på Dzyga Gallery. Bilderna från staden Pripyat, som övergavs efter Tjernobyl katastrofen, får nytt liv genom vacker poesi.

Den norske författaren Erlend Loe kommer även att besöka mässan och det norska temat för årets bokmässa ger hopp om fler svenska och danska inslag nästa år.

On the accusations bench you find the Orthodox nationalists “People’s Cathedral”. They have sued the exhibition and the organizers for “offending religious feelings”. The exhibited pieces at “Forbidden Art – 2006″ were such that was not athorized to be shown for the public. Among those works was a work by American artist Vagrich Bakhchanyan that shows a Soviet-era medal of Vladimir Lenin on a cross that should to give the impression that has been crucified.

From the exhibition “Forbidden Art 2006″

So I ask: Art? Who cares about art these days? Well, not many enough, some of you perhaps say. Far too many, the Russian State prosecutors seems to think and feel that they need to be protect us (or themselves?) from it’s force and power! Or is it just that the prosecutors believe that is possible to whatever they like with curators and artists? Since there are very few that protesters anyway?

It is actually high time we show them they are wrong!! We must act on an international level! We cannot let authorities (Russian, Swedish, Ukrainian, German, Italian etc etc) decide what kind of art that should be allowed to be shown. Show your support for the organizers and for the survival of freedom of expression!

Write on your blog about it!

Or join the Facebook-group shows the support for the organizers.

••••

Open letter from The European Cultural Parliament
Rights in Russia
At Russian News Line
At Radio Free Europe

Here is her set cha-cha-changes and below you can read her own thoughts.

I was born in S:t petersburg 23 years ago and lived there for all my life. I was only 9 years in 1995, so I don’t remember much from that time. I remember my school, coffe with buns, women selling “Pribaltic”-sweaters and wool hoods in front of DLT (Leningrad trade house). Illegal, I suppose.



But a lot of things have changed. As you can see in my sketches.

First one out is Maria Magnusson.

Maria grow up at a farm at the Swedish country side, in a small village called Norra Björke. She has BA and MA in Photography at The University of Gothenburg, Sweden and a BA of Arts in History and Theory of Art also at The University of Gothenburg.

Maria is working as a photographer and occasionally as DJ and has been engaged on special projects at Stockholm City Museum. In October 2009 she participated in the 12th Annual Antimatter Film Festival, Canada, with the art video Bliss out. She was also a warm-up DJ to Jan St Werner (Mouse on Mars) at Riche, Stockholm, October 2009.

This is Maria’s words about the pictures:

S:t Petersburg 1995/2010

What are they doing today I wonder?

What is avantgarde? I ask myself while sitting with avant-garde sculptor, musician, poet and theatre man Yuriy Zmorovych in his chaotic but very cozy studio in central Kyiv. Books, sculptures, self-made instruments, videotapes, DVDs and vinyl records are stacked in a very wayward regime only known by Yuriy. How should I manage to explain the greatness, humor and the presence of this man’s work, by just using some few words? I ask myself further. For many the term avant-garde have elitistic, pretentious and even obsolete conjections. But Yuriy Zmorovychs avantgarde do not fit into this description. His avantgarde expression is playful, intelligence which feels current and contemporary, without being pretentious. It must be the humor that is key to, I think, for Yuriy has no problem laughing captivating when he talks about his own creations and ideas.

ЮРИЙ ЗМОРОВИЧ / YURIY ZMOROVYCH

In the 1990s he started to work with international artists and one of the more memorable was when he worked with the French group improvisation ARFI. (ARFI stands for Association à la recherche d’un Folklore imaginaire.) In a few weeks in August 1991 they played on a river boat that went from Kiev to Odessa. Between their improvisations, they all sat like glued in front of the radio and listened to the reports on events from Moscow. It was the time when the Soviet Union fell apart.

In constant opposition
For Yuriy, this was symbolic. He went on his river boat and broke new ground, or traveling in new waters, with avantgarde musicians who had similar views on the creation of his own. And in then same time Soviet Union came to an end. For him, avantgarde must constantly stands in opposition to the norm, fighting oppression and those who exercise power.

It was never easy to be improvisational in the Soviet Union, he says, adding that it is of course much easier for young people today to choose that path. Jazz was, for example, prohibited, and he tells emphatically how he, after several years of searching, found “A Drum Is a Woman” by Duke Ellington on a black market in Odessa.

- Duke Ellington had a great spontaneity and it has always been fruitful for my own creativity. But since I came into improvised jazz and avant-garde, I must admit that I abandoned him to others. Along with the Dadaism and Malevich, Ellington are my icons, Yuriy implies.

Yuriy would not want to notify other sources of inspiration, and responds that it could be anything. The rain, a cat jamar, no talking, cars driving along the street, or an internal flow.

The key to the avantgarde expression, according to Yuriy to listen to the spontaneous creative process, to dare to open the doors to the inner voice and not be afraid of what you hear, and the second cornerstone of the avantgarde expression is that always stand in opposition against the norm. This expression is found in the inner voice if you just listen, he says.

His untuned piano was a great beginning
Already in the beginning, in 1970s, his drive was to create a kind of noise generator or stream from the innermost of the soul and the body. He says that he therefor began to play on an untuned piano. An excellent choice, Yuriy implies.

- In my ears it sounded accurate, of course, he laughs.

YURIY ZMOROVYCH

- Like this, he says and picks up an old plastic bottle with a round hole in the middle. Through the plastic bottle, he has strained a guitar string. When he plays on the string, while screws on the cap, it sounds actually strangely surreal.

Avantgarde theater
In the 1990s Yuriy had the opportunity to become the creative leader for avantgarde theater Teatr AA. His partner was Olexandr Nesterov (link in Ukrainian), a legendary avantgarde guitarist and composer who dead in 2005. They worked with both amateur and professional actors. Important for the project was to lead the actors to learn to play instruments, and to act spontaneously, to improvise. This was not always easy, since many were trained actors. To release an already learned knowledge of how acting should be is not easy, says Yuriy.

In Memoriam Nesterov – with Kiritchenko, Коtrа, Zagaykevych, Letov, Makarov, Borisov, Yaremchuk, Tovstukha, Khmelyov, Ohrymchuk, Strelnikov, Klymenko, Zmorovych, Smetanin, Rudyi, Putyatin, Khmelyov, Makhno. NOTE! You hear Zmorovych in the second piece (if ou have any problem hearing it here, go to the website, see the link above) and not on the first, that is Yuriy Yaremchuck performing!

Teatr AAA got much attention, not only in former Soviet Union but also in Western Europe and the USA. But during the crisis years of the 1990s the sponsors fled and the theater had to be closed.

“Avantgarde should never be decorative”
Yuriy loves to to work with amateurs. He argues that the most important thing is to be creative and to be self-taught and that does not necessarily mean that you do not know how to create. He argues that many musicians or artists in avantgarde often are overly decorative in their design and not in opposition to the norm. He points a little at his compatriot Yuriy Jaremchych, he also worked with previously. But they have chosen different ways and is therefore not entirely agree on the avantgarde expression. At the same time Yuriy Zmorovych would never allow condemnation against other artists.

I ask him what he thinks about the future and he urge that he believes that a new generations will bring avantgarde further to new dimensions. The forms will of course be different, but the most incentives will stand.

- The human mind is collective, and our knowledge is shared. New influences will of course be added as our lives are changing. These are doors that the avantgardist should open. But how it will be can only the future reveal, he concludes.

And I am really feel enthusiastic by his optimism.