Artwork: Heart Tania Sklyar, 2023
Photos of the exhibition
Heartbeat
A joint exhibition (by artists from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia)
Vernissage: Fri, 02 June 2023 on 7pm
Exhibition duration: 04 June to 16 July 2023
“We as artists from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia are participating in this exhibition. Yes, we are performing together. We all go through pain and anger. But we do not accept hatred between the artists of our countries. Hate is what the regime that started the war wants. If we start hating each other, they will have won. They will not win.”
Heartbeat is an exhibition of contemporary art jointly developed by artists from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Many of the artworks will be created especially for the exhibition. On display will be paintings, sculptures, videos and works on paper. The dismay the artists feel as people from the countries directly affected by the war was the motivation for this exhibition project.
Artists
Tania Sklyar (Odessa/Berlin)
Julia Katan (Odessa/Berlin)
Katya Tishkevich (Minsk)
Masha Garash (Minsk)
Liudmila Belova (St. Petersburg/Rose, Montenegro)
Marina Koldobskaya (St. Petersburg/Berlin)
The works on display represent an immediate direct personal experience of human suffering and passions, which in one way or another are linked to the tragedy of their countries.
Katya Tishkevich’s graphic and sculptural works literally bring to life the physical pain, trauma and horror of the destruction of the human being.
Marina Koldobskaya’s brutal primitivist painting shows a blind, animalistic, frenzied aggression that takes everything and everyone with it.
Liudmila Belova’s video focuses on the harrowing, endless anticipation of the unknown (spellbinding) catastrophe. The catastrophe itself remains a restrained theme, but in the artist’s graphic works one can see the sad image of the “landscape after the battle”.
Tania Sklyar’s objects symbolically show the pathological damage to the collective body of humanity, the collapse of consciousness leading to the destruction of life itself.
The surrealist works of Julia Katan, based on the Ukrainian folklore tradition, point to the dark, unreasonable forces that control the events of our lives.
Masha Garash’s mystical videos are about the violation of the “moral law within us”, without which there is no way to the “starry sky above us”.
Responsibility without morality, punishment without crime, guilt without blame and sorrow without end – this is what the artists experience.
Artwork (detail): Marina Koldobskaya
Evalution (Cry of Eva)
16 July 2023, 6 pm
Antiwar Music Concert-Performance
50 min
With texts by banned contemporary poets from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus
Music
Electric Guitar – Alexey Potapov
Live Electronics – Dmitry Remezov
Performance – Katarina Teise
On the occasion of the closing event of the exhibition Heartbeat in der Galerie Wolf & Galentz
Artist from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus
Concept: Marina Koldobskaya
Katarina Teise is a multidisciplinary artist and actress working in photography, video, costume design, performance and installation. She was born in Kiev and started working as a model at the age of 14. She grew up in a Bohemian milieu with artists, directors, musicians and other creative people. She studied at the Moscow Art Theatre School and with Slava Polunin and his creative laboratory The Yellow Mill near Paris. The longing for the lost world of childlike spontaneity, the sincerity of dreams and fantasies and poetry is currently the focus of Katarina Teise’s work. On 24 February 2022 her whole family fled from the Russian war of aggression and they have lived as refugees ever since. Katarina has been making performances and organising anti-war protests in Berlin and Moscow, staging her resistance in action art. She lives in Berlin.
Alexey Potapov (electric guitar) and Dmitry Remezov (live electronics) are the DARP-Duo, an electro-acoustic project of two musicians with a background in professional avant-garde music. They play contemporary electronic music from dark ambient to free improvisation. The duo is based in Cologne.
Dmitry Remezov is a composer, producer and performer of electronic music. He currently lives and works in Cologne. He is co-founder of the experimental music ensemble unfeed format (Cologne), leader and co-founder of the visionary KYMATIC ensemble (Moscow); founder of the leading contemporary music ensemble of the Urals InterText (Ekaterinburg). He has created more than 40 works combining music, video and performance art. He studied with Michael Beil, one of the most prominent composers on the European multimedia art scene, and he is a graduate of the Ural Moussorgsky Conservatory in composition.
Alexy Potapov plays electric guitar as well as classical guitar. He currently works mainly in the genres of new music, experimental and improvised music. Born in the Volgograd region, he lived in Moscow for a long time and worked with many ensembles, orchestras and theatres. After the Russian aggression against Ukraine began, he left Russia. He currently lives in Germany.
