Fedir Tetyanych (1942–2007) grew up during World War II in the village of Kniazhychi near Kyiv. There, through his early contact with land and nature, and against the backdrop of the armed conflict (as a child he was injured by a piece of a projectile), his idiosyncratic perception of rural cosmism and human responsibility for the surrounding world took form.

As an artist, Tetyanych worked against the constraints of various ideologies and disciplines. He was an author of monumentalist mosaics and decorative panels in the Soviet era, a chronicler of Ukrainian indigenous cosmologies and Cossacks’ anarchist history, a joyous performer, writer of cosmist and ecological manifestos, egalitarian hoarder of objects and an activist who wished to turn landfill sites and factories into theatres. All these labels apply yet collectively fail to encompass Tetyanych’s nonconformist legacy and prolific output.

In the 1960s, the artist began his first State commissions for monumental decorations in public space, which he often created using found items: discarded industrial waste, scraps of metal, cans, screws and shards of glass. These materials became prime matter for his future costumes and performances on the streets of Kyiv from the 1980s onwards.

Tetyanych considered his whole life to be one single performance, but he was more informed by science-fiction literature, cybernetics and cycles of nature than by any of his contemporaries in the field of avant-garde art. In the 1970s, he developed his own version of ecologically-informed cosmism, stemming from an awareness of infinite unity with the universe and mutual interconnectedness, which he called Frypulia. According to him, humanity, even if eventually turned into radio waves or rays of light, would carry information about itself and reappear at any point of space and time. 

The exhibition pays special attention to Tetyanych’s concept of the biotechnosphere – an autonomous unit for shelter, energy-storage and transportation. The artist made numerous drawings and watercolours imagining their future application, he also installed the actual models in public space; for example, by incorporating them into his State-commissioned monumentalist works. Today, as we witness the rise of fossil-fascism, sowing crisis and military and information warfare, it is uncanny to trace the previous locations of biotechnospheres in Popasna, Peremoga and Kyiv on a map; in many instances, they mirror current sites of brutal military destruction.

As none of these sculptures survived the past political transformation, and while Ukraine continues to resist the ruthless genocidal and ecocidal Russian invasion, what can we learn from Tetyanych? A radical shift of political imagination and visuality is urgently needed. Tetyanych’s strategy of resistance and political experiment offers us a glimpse into what a project of world-making and healing could mean, but what place does his insubordinate practice occupy in the visual canon of the international avant-garde? Or, indeed, outside it? His future-oriented project reminds us that repair and ethics need to be constantly anticipated, rehearsed and practiced outside of art to produce sustainable results. Natalia Sielewicz would like to thank Anna Tetyanych-Bublyk, Bohdan Tetyanych-Bublyk, Lada Tetyanych-Bublyk, Nikita Kadan, Liza German and Anna Potiomkina.

 

The exhibition 'Fedir Tetyanych. The Neverending Eye' is a presentation of one of the most visionary Ukrainian artists working at the intersection of cosmism, performance, cybernetics and ecology-driven practice. The show introduces his multifaceted oeuvre, which embodied a continued search for artistic freedom and euphoric unity with the universe. 

Fedir Tetyanych (1942–2007) grew up during World War II in the village of Kniazhychi near Kyiv. There, through his early contact with land and nature, and against the backdrop of the armed conflict (as a child he was injured by a piece of a projectile), his idiosyncratic perception of rural cosmism and human responsibility for the surrounding world took form.

As an artist, Tetyanych worked against the constraints of various ideologies and disciplines. He was an author of monumentalist mosaics and decorative panels in the Soviet era, a chronicler of Ukrainian indigenous cosmologies and Cossacks’ anarchist history, a joyous performer, writer of cosmist and ecological manifestos, egalitarian hoarder of objects and an activist who wished to turn landfill sites and factories into theatres. All these labels apply yet collectively fail to encompass Tetyanych’s nonconformist legacy and prolific output.

In the 1960s, the artist began his first State commissions for monumental decorations in public space, which he often created using found items: discarded industrial waste, scraps of metal, cans, screws and shards of glass. These materials became prime matter for his future costumes and performances on the streets of Kyiv from the 1980s onwards.

Tetyanych considered his whole life to be one single performance, but he was more informed by science-fiction literature, cybernetics and cycles of nature than by any of his contemporaries in the field of avant-garde art. In the 1970s, he developed his own version of ecologically-informed cosmism, stemming from an awareness of infinite unity with the universe and mutual interconnectedness, which he called Frypulia. According to him, humanity, even if eventually turned into radio waves or rays of light, would carry information about itself and reappear at any point of space and time. 

The exhibition pays special attention to Tetyanych’s concept of the biotechnosphere – an autonomous unit for shelter, energy-storage and transportation. The artist made numerous drawings and watercolours imagining their future application, he also installed the actual models in public space; for example, by incorporating them into his State-commissioned monumentalist works. Today, as we witness the rise of fossil-fascism, sowing crisis and military and information warfare, it is uncanny to trace the previous locations of biotechnospheres in Popasna, Peremoga and Kyiv on a map; in many instances, they mirror current sites of brutal military destruction.

As none of these sculptures survived the past political transformation, and while Ukraine continues to resist the ruthless genocidal and ecocidal Russian invasion, what can we learn from Tetyanych? A radical shift of political imagination and visuality is urgently needed. Tetyanych’s strategy of resistance and political experiment offers us a glimpse into what a project of world-making and healing could mean, but what place does his insubordinate practice occupy in the visual canon of the international avant-garde? Or, indeed, outside it? His future-oriented project reminds us that repair and ethics need to be constantly anticipated, rehearsed and practiced outside of art to produce sustainable results.

Natalia Sielewicz would like to thank Anna Tetyanych-Bublyk, Bohdan Tetyanych-Bublyk, Lada Tetyanych-Bublyk, Nikita Kadan, Liza German and Anna Potiomkina.

 

 

 

 

 

The extraneous domestic gesture of placing a pot of drinking water on the street outside for the stray passer-by creates a small space, the tiniest space of reprieve, a narrow opening for the not-quite encounter. The invited artists make work at the edges of legality, entering directly within international law and its processes, dissect genocide; and expose the absurdities of the state, fixed identities, and borders. The artisanal water pumps in refugee-camp courtyards, the fountain in the window-shattered piazza, the matka at the doorstep are extraneous. They fuse with the possibility of extraterritoriality, exceeding national ideas of jurisdiction, sovereignty and constitutionally given identities, and monumentality. Their extraneousness make them sites of meeting, capable of encounter, capable of reimagining affiliation, the polis, citizenship, refuge. Can territory be exceeded? How to be out of territory? What extraneous space is opened by the extraterritorial or the unidentified? Can a failed forensic identifier open space for abstract, infinite possibilities of identification against identity politics, and constitutional, nationally-sanctioned communities and borders?

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When lost, perplexed, or shocked, we reorient ourselves by reestablishing a cardinal reference (east, north) as a spatial metaphor to determine a position relative to our surroundings. It differs from the way in which positional navigation systems deal with being astray. Rerouting is different from reorienting in that it calculates all the possible ways, tracks, and paths after a wrong turn, as if they were all simultaneously available and it were only a matter of computational power to identify the right one. Not so much a directional notion that can always be summoned as an aim, as orientation seemed to suggest, but an indiscriminate scanning of all possible bifurcations, of separating lines out of an indistinct mesh. If we stretched the analogy of this pair to the incertitude that has characterized our present, we'd have to admit that the optimistic, technified mode of positioning ourselves entails a naturalized ideological worldview made of pragmatic choices. Lines as vectors, but also as connectors and as borders feature as a recurrent element in the works that thread this exhibition. The three main uses for lines in diagrammatic representations (directing, connecting, and separating) imply the relation between two entities. A timeline, two connected units or two divided areas, all imply a diametrical difference between two things and therefore a specular relation and a threshold.

The Body is Sacrament is an investigation into the East vs West dichotomy as a paradigm that supports imperialism and nationalism. Placing together the works of four American artists–Calli Roche, Catalina Ouyang, Harry Gould Harvey, and Nathaniel Oliver–this show will explore the way in which hierarchical social structures, such as class, race, gender, and ability, systematically divorce certain Americans from their own Western identity. At the same time, however, the East provides no relief for such marginalized people. The Body is Sacrament will dig deeper at this geographical and cultural binary in order to understand the ways in which the East, as well as the West, becomes an oppressive construct that serve to maintain control over citizens of nation states. The East gets rendered as the esoteric opposite of the West, in which the sacred is treated as science. In turn, the West enforces a seemingly empirical ethics of the enlightenment. By exploring these ideas, KJ Freeman is interested in searching for solace beyond the confines and indoctrination of Western ethics. Elements of sadomasochism that prop these systems at large seep into the works of Calli Roche and Catalina Ouyong. These artists’ use of leather, fabric, wax and discarded ephemera signal a cathartic purge that transform raw material into biblical-like relics. Harry Gould Harvey’s constellation of systems of divinity echo these sentiments, while Nathaniel Oliver’s attention to Creole deities and Afro-futurist imagery, paints the architecture of jazz as a sonic practice that is at once mathematical and mythical, deeply rooted in ancient African spiritual practices that predate the problematic division of the globe. KJ’s approach to curation is holistic and driven by an overarching need to frame and highlight the unseen.

 

 

Georg Kargl Fine Arts is pleased to present the exhibition "I Had a Dog and a Cat", inspired by the life and work of Josef Čapek (1887, Hronov – 1945, Bergen-Belsen), an artist and writer, who challenged the existing thinking and behaviour of his time. Featuring works by eight contemporary artists, the exhibition draws a parallel between the animals from the children's book "All About Doggie and Pussycat" (J. Čapek, 1929), which transform everyday tasks at their home into creative and exceptional situations, and the selected artists, who, each in their own way, share the involvement of combining divergent things and situations that might otherwise not meet. Collisions and contradictions, present in the ordinary and the common, give rise to truly authentic responses. The exhibition design is based on the occurrence of natural light within the existing conditions of the building and the physical experience of the body in the space.

Presented by Christine König Galerie in the framework of the curated by program, the exhibition entitled SEMMI SEM SEMMI features works by Endre Tót, one of the most significant figures of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde generation, as well as an emblematic figure of international conceptual and mail art. The works comprised in the show were realized between the early 1970s and the 2010s, after Tót gave up – abstract expressionist and Informel – painting in 1970, only to return to the painterly gesture in total secrecy in the 1980s and to reveal this fact in the Summer of 2021. During these five decades, the Hungarian artist elaborated and unfolded thematic conceptual series in a variety of (new) media such artist books, telegrams, postcards, typewriting, postal and rubber stamps, video, posters, graffiti, banners or actions. The pieces on view in the exhibition investigate the three fundamental concepts he conceived by 1971, termed Zer0, Joy and Rain, that were elaborated as conceptual survival strategies using derision and humour against the grim Socialist everyday life. In the light of this year’s traumatic geopolitical events, the war in Ukraine raging at our borders, and the still prevailing East-West dichotomy that shapes our existence, Endre Tót’s life – balancing between Hungary and West Germany since 1979 – and works remain sharply relevant, contemporary, therefore offering a visual, conceptual antidote to our anxious times.

The concept and motif of Zer0 first made its appearance in the artist’s mail art activity, a form of artistic communication that conveyed perfectly his idea-based art, while also constituting the only means to initiate correspondence as early as 1971 with the most prominent figures of the international avant-garde from behind the iron curtain. For Tót, the Zer0 sign, which embodied the mathematical concept of nothing, primarily symbolised the absurdity of communication, but also the concepts of absence and presence, while the philosophical and political aspects of the character “0” certainly reflected an ontological approach of the condition of both citizens and artists under state Socialism. The text, as a means of communication – was dangerous grounds considering how the freedom of speech was curbed in the socialist regime. Tót’s works, however, communicated by not communicating, by saying nothing, and by picturing absence, as expressed in the Nothing, Absent Painting and Blackout Painting series – in direct connection with the Zer0 concept.

The second group of artworks from Endre Tót’s early conceptual period are his Rain pieces. The raining pattern, created with an economy of visual means by repeatedly hitting the “/” sign on the typewriter, is always accompanied by text, a fertile ground for the intellectual playfulness characteristic of Endre Tót’s approach, which at times manifested in the form of banal tautology, and at other times as (self-)ironic artistic self-expression or humorous political references. Found pictures – postcards, reproductions of well-known paintings, or images from magazines – comprised the basis of a significant portion of the “Rain” works, in which the artist inserted texts with references to the image or the shape of the rain, in clear connection with visual poetry.

Made in 1971, Endre Tót’s first Joy-piece which was a single sentence in English and Hungarian on a postcard-sized cardboard sheet: “I am glad that I could have this sentence printed.” In the light of the authoritarian control exerted by the socialist regime over any form of publishing, printing and circulating texts, Tót’s sentence is an ironic expression of the optimism demanded by the state from its citizens. Tót himself writes the following: “My ‘Joys’ were the reflections of the totalitarian state of the seventies. I responded with the absurd euphoria of Joys to censorship, isolation, suppression sensed in every field of life, though this suppression worked with the subtlest means, hardly visible.” The artist’s recognition of the fact that he cannot be held accountable by the authorities for expressing his joy gave rise to further Joy-pieces, the development, universalisation of the topic as well as the Tót’s gradually unfolding actionism, especially the Gladness Demonstrations and the series Very Special Gladnesses, associating image and text.

The artist will be present for the opening and will realise a site-specific piece on the walls of the space.
The exhibition is organised in collaboration with acb Gallery, Budapest.

 

 

The exhibition takes its starting point from the understanding of fluid and transformative existence, relations and presences, the expanded idea of intimacy and its practices from friendship to kinship. It brings together artists with diverse mixed media practices whose collaborative and individual works interrogate the contemporary condition through the somatic and explore the relationship between bodies and the organization of space. Informed by queer ecologies, feminism, critical anthropology, re-envisioning collective futures and infrastructures the presentation revolves around notions of radical joy, abundance, vulnerability and resilience. 

Sensory Tales features a line-up of artists from different generations, backgrounds and geographies whose practices share a nuanced and transformative treatment of their chosen media challenging us to reconsider how we read and understand facets of reality and identity.

“Whether any act of interference is good or bad is a value judgment that could be based logically on the type of interference and the ends for which the interference is conducted.” (Richard W. Cottam, Competitive Interference and Twentieth Century Diplomacy, 1967) In a world where “industrialized disinformation“ is orchestrated by specialized companies working for governments and at least 70 countries employ cyber troops that spread propaganda, the exhibition Interference. Traces, Stories, and Ghosts honors interference as an artistic strategy to pursue progressive goals. As such, its efficiency was first fully recognized by the DADA art movement, which aimed at “disordering the concepts and all the little tropical rains of demoralisation, disorganisation, destruction and collision of sense- making”, as Tristan Tzara put it in 1920. By evoking a feeling of meaning in me, without becoming totally clear, Tzara’s claim disturbs my expectations and thus exemplifies a type of artistic interference. As full-fledged methods of both warfare and artistic troublemaking, interference came to fruition at roughly the same time, in the Cold War period of the 1960s. But while both meddle with truth and reality, they differ fundamentally in their intentions and aims. The often playful acts of artistic interference featured in the show are productive, not destructive. Their driving force is imagination, not following orders. Acting as a spoke in the wheel of the ordinary course of events, including our compulsive scrolling and algorithm- induced acts of “sharing”, they interfere with our ordinary online and offline existences and entice us to pause and reflect. Rather than virality and big numbers, their values are singularity and deceleration. Instead of spreading disinformation, they beget critical thinking. The Positive Interference Lab (PIL) that will first be developed in the framework of the exhibition, is a place where artistic impulse can turn into artful thinking and actions. An abode of active dialogue and community rather than repetition and division, it is a dojo where we can all improve our interference jiu-jitsu. Rather than spreading anger, a cult of leadership and the idea that there is only one truth, the show experiments with counter narratives, historical storytelling, national geographies, the history of art, autobiography and joyfully conjuring ghosts. The works in the exhibition are representational without depicting in a traditional sense, and you will find that most of them show symptoms of what Simon O’Sullivan has called “Fictioning”. They are, in this sense, “aimed at creating “a ‘new’ landscape, a new platform for dreaming” where “it is no longer clear where the fiction itself ends and so-called reality begins (or where reality ends and the fiction begins). Fictioning inserts itself into the real in this sense – into the world as-it-is (indeed, it collapses the so- called real and the fictional), but, in so doing, it necessarily changes our reality.“ (O’Sullivan). While the invited artists span several generations and the way their art affects reality differ considerably, their art consciously aims beyond what Didier Eribond has called “the narcissistic contemporary art world”, an intention honored by the Positive Interference Lab, where citizens are invited to develop their own interference strategies. Klaus Speidel

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