VYSTAVKA-CHITANKA (exhibition-reading)

What can be read? What can reading become? VYSTAVKA-CHYTANKA (“exhibition-reading”) was conceived as an exhibition about reading and for reading, presenting artistic statements interwoven with textuality in various forms.

Taking Karen Barad’s proposition that “discursiveness is always already materialistic, and materiality is always already discursive” as a point of departure, the exhibition explored the relationship between theory, artistic practice, and everyday forms of symbolic participation. While the notion of the “always already” often remains abstract or speculative, writing, reading, and other discursive practices continue to shape professional, social, and affective existence. At the same time, the curatorial project approached these practices with curiosity, playfulness, and collective experimentation.

The exhibition addressed a series of questions: Can artistic practice trust theory? How can theoretical constructions be tested materially and performatively? What forms of communication can emerge between artists and theorists? How might feminist material-discursive approaches be grounded within artistic practice — articulating matter and meaning together — and what role can silence play within such articulations?

Participants included Uliana Bychenkova, Welcome to the Doll House!, Katerina Lisovenko, Lisichki Collective, Nastya Teor, Natasha Chichasova, Friedrich Chernyshev, and Anna Scherbyna.

The exhibition was realized within the framework of the Bridging Feminisms project with financial support from the German Federal Foreign Office.

Alongside the exhibition, a series of reading gatherings and discussions took place, focusing on different positional relationships between textuality and visuality — including objectivity, tactility, and embodiment — within contemporary feminist artistic and theoretical practices.

Uliana Bychenkova, Katerina Lisovenko, Nastya Teor, Friedrich Chernyshev, Anna Scherbyna. Zine “Mass Uncovering”, digital printing, 2020.

Anna Scherbyna. “A thing”, painting, pieces of broken pottery, text, 2020.

Welcome to the Doll House! Text “Exercise Girlfriend”, print on a risograph, 2019. “Found duet”. Diptych, floristry. 28 x 28 cm each piece, date of creation not established, approximately 1990–2000s. The objects were found on the second hand market “Sirius”, Kyiv, 2020. Conceptual note “Objet Trouvé!!”, print on a risograph, 2020. Zine “Guidelines from Strawberry and Water”, print on a risograph, 2020.

Nastya Teor. “Shy flirting with the guards”, print, installation, text, 2020.

Katerina Lisovenko. “Fairy tale”, paper, acryl, ink, text, 2020.

Natasha Chichasova. “The letter I don’t want to send, but which I want to make visible”, text, 2020.

Lisichki collective. Zine “The body as rose-woman candle”, 2016. Digital printing, 2020.

Photo: Natalka Dyachenko