Open Group on Representing Poland at the 60th Venice Biennale

ArtReview sent a questionnaire to artists and curators exhibiting in and curating the various national pavilions of the 2024 Venice Biennale, the responses to which will be published daily in the leadup to and during the Venice Biennale, which runs from 20 April – 24 November.

The Ukrainian collective Open Group (Yuriy Biley, Anton Varga, Pavlo Kovach) is representing Poland; the pavilion is in the Giardini.

ArtReview What do you think of when you think of Venice?

Open Group All of us have our different personal memories of Venice. But we definitely formed most of those when we came to Venice for the first time in 2015, and we stayed there for two months each because of the specificity of our work at that time. It was the first year of the war in Ukraine, and we participated in a group exhibition in the Ukrainian Pavilion called Hope! We were making Synonym for “wait”, a performance in which each of us starved for about three weeks, losing weight every day, in order to gain knowledge about the unbearable wait for something that was vital, to gain an understanding that was otherwise inaccessible to us. All of us shared the unforgettable experience of not eating for a few weeks but still walking every day to the pavilion and back through Venice with its canal smells, aromas of morning coffee, and working restaurants. We often talk about those old days, actually every time we are back on the island.  

AR What can you tell us about your exhibition plans for Venice?

OG The project Repeat After Me II, which will be on view at the Polish Pavilion, addresses a similar theme by referring to the war experiences of refugees. It is an installation that consists of two videos with karaoke elements. The first part, Repeat after me (2022), was filmed in Lviv (Ukraine) in a camp for internally displaced persons. It can hardly be called a safe place. Being in the country during the war shapes one’s understanding of normality about high-risk and lower-risk places for life, but in general, the whole country during the war is a big training ground. In contrast, the safe locations of the second part of the work, Repeat After Me (2024), filmed in Europe in camps, hotels, hostels – temporary places for refugees, which also welcomed war refugees from Ukraine – are the opposite. Both parts of the work talk about memory, namely the memory of an ongoing war. The exhibition in the pavilion is reminiscent of a military karaoke bar of the future. We envision it as a meeting place where, in a relaxed atmosphere, viewers can learn about the experience of witnessing war and perhaps gain knowledge that may someday become useful. The shadow of the apocalyptic is also undeniable in this work, and we are preparing viewers for a future scenario in which such “karaoke bars” have become the norm. In our work, karaoke becomes a method of communication between the protagonists/witnesses of the war and the audience, where, along with trying to instruct a stranger, there is also a sense of inability to communicate one’s experience.

AR Why is the Venice Biennale still important, if at all? And what is the importance of showing there? Is it about visibility, inclusion, acknowledgement?

OG Despite the wars and political tensions we face, the Biennale provides a ground for exchange and solidarity in the name of art. It’s an arena that brings together diverse voices and stories from around the world. This year, it is an opportunity for us to talk about the war in Ukraine again, which is a big enough reason. Also, it would help if you kept in mind that for 80 years, Ukrainian art was basically excluded from such international events, which became ordinary for the European public. In 2019, our curatorial idea of the Ukrainian pavilion was exactly the Ukrainian obsessiveness and need to be included in the Western canon, as well as ignorance and low interest of Western institutions in everything that had its own separate, sometimes strange development behind the Iron Curtain. In 2019, in our curatorial project The Shadow Of Dream* Cast Upon Giardini Della Biennale presented at the Ukranian Pavilion, we tried to cast a shadow over Venice with the biggest plane in the world, Mriya, which Russians would soon destroy during the first months of the full-scale invasion. Now, we are representing the Polish pavilion with works about people’s experiences that helped them survive that full-scale invasion of Russia. So, yes, we all should be critical of the Venice Biennale as some massive formation that represents the power dynamics and capital of the contemporary world, but still as artists from an “invisible” region – or at least invisible before the tragedy of war – we can definitely confirm the importance of having a chance to be around your colleagues, to be part of the conversation, to be included.

AR When you make artworks do you have a specific audience in mind?

OG We often think about this. After all, very often, the public becomes a participant in our works, takes part in the interactive elements of our works, and completes them. In a way, we are always interested in the very ordinary, simple life situations and experiences. But the reality is that the war became a mundane experience for Ukrainians as well. Our work, which will be in the Polish pavilion this year, was initially created with the idea of viewers from outside Ukraine who have no experience of war being able to hear/see some subtleties of the war and its day-to-day ambiance. In a more dystopian reading, our work can be described as a so-called instruction or manual of very special knowledge that war witnesses share for some future usage by those on the receiving end. It is also a warning. Behind that, there is always the question of the operator: who is behind the work, who made it, what can really be conveyed, and how effectively can this particular experience be expressed, if it can at all?

AR Do you think there is such a thing as national art? Or is all art universal? Is there something that defines your nation’s artistic traditions? And what is misunderstood or forgotten about your nation’s art history?

OG For years, the part of the Biennale based on national pavilions has seemed archaic in relation to art. We treat art as something that is transnational, something that can bring people together, regardless of origin, nationality, or place of residence. Some pavilions often provide an interesting transnational concept even within the Biennale’s rigid structure. Our exhibition in the Polish pavilion is an example of this. In the history of the Polish Pavilion, however, we are not the first. Poland is a good example of the inclusiveness and sustainability of this event.

As for the artistic traditions of Ukraine, it’s important to understand that in the last century, Ukrainian culture was totally developing alongside the political cataclysms and humanitarian catastrophes that were direct or indirect consequences of Russian occupation and Soviet repression practices. The art of modern Ukraine in the twentieth century was crushed by political realities, wars and collapsed economics. The Socialist Realism doctrine became the official art ideology in 1934, and just a few years later, from 1936–38, a whole generation of Ukrainian artists, writers and poets was completely eliminated by the special services (NKVD), a period that became known as the ‘Executed Renaissance’. After that, all visual artists were trained in the socialist realist tradition, which produced a lot of interesting formalist explorations and became a safe harbour for some artists and a curse for most. Socialist realism, even with a strong and bright avant-garde impulse from the beginning, soon became some dark knowledge that was embraced and developed at an absurdly high price; it became a present element in all further artistic searches, knowledge to work with, to expand in, or to fight against. After the Second World War, the 60s were marked by a cultural resurrection in Ukraine and all over the Union, but even that ended soon with the directions from the Union to keep under cover any artistic progress outside of Moscow. The Moscovian Metropoly couldn’t allow free thought anywhere else outside its own walls. Pavlo Bedzir, an iconic artist from our region (and teacher of Pavlo Kovach, the father of Open Group member Pavlo Kovach Jr), often had to pretend to be mentally insufficient when asked about his abstract works, which he produced in parallel to his socialist realist work. And that is just one story from hundreds all over Ukraine and probably thousands all over the Union. The funny part was that even after the Soviet Union collapsed, interest in nonconformist art was mostly directed towards Moscow again, which was just a continuation of the imperial narrative of the one and only capital of the Union’s arts and culture. After 1991, Russia continued to use the pavilion built by the Ukrainian magnate Khanenko back in 1914 when Ukraine was still a part of the Russian Empire. Independent Ukraine only had its own pavilion in Venice from 2001. It was a huge dirty-green Soviet military tent placed inside the Giardini. Wasn’t it prophetic?

AR If someone were to visit your nation, what three things would you recommend they see or read in order to understand it better?

OG It very much depends on the time, weather, mood, the person who would come, the city, etc. In one of the cases, it could be Bucha, Irpin or Gostomel, places of mass burials in the twenty-first century in the centre of Europe; on another day, it could be a tour of self-organised galleries, volunteer hubs, museums and theatres. What to read? From history to better understand what’s happening, it would be Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015) and Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands (2010). Fiction and documentary literature got a lot of new names recently, because so many people are fighting simultaneously as they are trying to create. An excellent point to explore contemporary Ukraine in literature would be reading the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, Victoria Amelina’s poetry and fiction, and Maksym Kryvtsov’s poetry. All three of them were killed on the battlefront or nearby while fighting or volunteering.

AR Which other artists have influenced or inspired you?

OG In different periods, there will be various other artists. Three of us have our influences, but from the very beginning of Open Group, collectively, we can distinguish Yuriy Sokolov, Pavlo Kovach (senior), Pavlo Bedzir, Oskar Hansen, Collective Actions, Art & Language, Fluxus, Academia Ruchu, Yael Bartana, Harun Farocki, Felix Gonzalez-Torres – and many others. 

AR What, other than your own work, are you looking forward to seeing while you are in Venice?

OG To be honest, we are just excited to see friends and colleagues from different countries. As for exhibitions, we would like to see an exhibition in the Ukrainian pavilion, with which we have been metaphysically connected since 2015. We are thrilled that Ukraine will be represented despite the war because we know how hard it is to work out the budgets for such significant events as Venice for a country that is literally at war and in continuous economic decline because of it. Our friend Anna Jermolaewa will be representing the Austrian Pavilion, so we are also very excited about that one. Ultimately, such an important event means that all three of us will meet physically in one place, which doesn’t happen too often because we have lived in different countries for nine years. Since the war started and Pavlo started serving in the army, the opportunities to meet all together have become even rarer.

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The 60th Venice Biennale, 20 April – 24 November