Maryna, the main heroine of Twenty One, has only one wish that her soldier husband Petro comes back alive. She frantically raises tens of thousands of dollars online to buy drones, weapons and power generators for the front line.
Of Lithuanian-Russian heritage, Panova's work is informed by that layered cultural inheritance as growing up between cultures has shaped her sensitivity to shifting narratives. Her work explores folklore, quiet, and images that feel suspended between past and present.
Now in the fourth year of a war sparked by Russia's 2022 invasion, life in Ukraine is challenging in ways that only those that have lived through something similar can even begin to comprehend. It's the loss of a generation of men fighting and dying on the front lines; civilian deaths and injuries caused by indiscriminate drone and missile attacks; acute shortages and the manifold disruptions of everyday life, not least of the hopes and aspirations of young ballet students in a country with a proud tradition in this art form.
An artwork is not created when an artist finishes it. It is created when it's visible to an audience and when it becomes discourse. If there's no ecosystem, nothing works. Central Asia is in the midst of an unprecedented investment in such art infrastructure, including new permanent venues, purpose-built museums, and international biennials.
We want to show people something of the physical reality of the conflict. We hope to bring it home to them that this is a war going on here and now in Europe, and that we ignore it at our peril.
It was like living in two worlds, and having to go from one to another in a dramatic way. From attending film festivals and walking down red carpets to crossing the Poland border and getting into the trenches, recalls Ukrainian filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov (Kharkiv, 40 years old) of September 2023, when he was headed from screening to screening, kicking off the race to the Oscars that he would ultimately win with his documentary 20 Days in Mariupol.
In order to create a unique visual language for the single, Julia embarked on a three-month-long project of handcrafting and painting 300 individual ceramic tiles to make up the music video frames, each with their own beautiful irregularities and imperfections in glaze. Structured in grids of twelve, these tiles were swapped out like puzzle pieces in the final stop motion, using zoetropes and evolving motifs to follow "the meditative rhythm of the song through repetition, noise, and texture", the artist says.
Across Georgia, a series of stunning frescoes traces the country's fractious history, from its early Christian origins to the Soviet-era socialist utopianism. It was through these murals that Nina Kintsurashvili first encountered art-traveling with her father, Lasha, as he journeyed to remote mountain regions to restore medieval murals and re-learn the art of fresco painting. Here, she discovered the importance of perspective, space and line work through the logic of Byzantine and Georgian iconography, absorbing a semiotic system she has adapted and distorted,
UNESCO expressed "serious concern" about recent Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities "that have caused damage to civilian infrastructures, including heritage sites" in Odesa, Lviv, and Kyiv.
Modern Art is pleased to present Polygrapher, the first solo exhibition by Joseph Yaeger since announcing his representation by the gallery, and the inaugural exhibition at their Bennet Street gallery. Polygrapher denotes both the exhibition title and a text written by the artist, published in the exhibition's accompanying booklet. Taking the form of an interrogation the artist underwent attached to a Stoelting UltraScribe--and in which only the answers have been transcribed--it creates a framework for the experience of the subsequent paintings.
THE TITLE OF THE KW SHOW is "RATIO." The term comes from economics, this idea of balance. But I'm applying it to the conflict here in the DRC, which is based around our strategic rare minerals. I'm talking about customs, electronics, space, minerals. In my country, we only ever talk about making phones, about buying a new phone. I advise young people who are looking at the front of their phone-at the screen-to keep the back of their phone in mind;
