How Two Kyiv Art Centers Are Making It Work
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Loading... - Milan Klein
- 11 Apr 2023
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Despite electricity outages and shellings, Voloshyn Gallery is eager to join Pinchuk Art Centre in revitalizing the Ukrainian capital’s art scene.
Max and Julia Voloshyn thought they were in for a long trip when they left Kyiv—home of their namesake gallery, Voloshyn—for a series of art fairs in Guadalajara, Dallas, and Miami in the fall of 2021. They were right—and then some. It’s now been nearly a year and a half since the couple stepped foot in Ukraine, where war with Russia broke out shortly before they originally planned to return home. “We have a three-year-old daughter, and we can’t bring a little kid to a place where you can expect shellings,” Julia says, noting that the family has finally rented an apartment in Miami after a year’s worth of constantly bouncing between Airbnbs.
Nevertheless, the Voloshyns plan to reopen their gallery space later this month with an exhibition that will use the camera obscura as a conceit for the light that art can bring to the darkness currently blacking out Ukraine (both literally and figuratively). The hope to restore their pre-wartime operations may seem overly optimistic, but proof that it can be done is just a few blocks away, at the sprawling Pinchuk Art Centre, which has been fully operational since last June. On weekdays, the museum attracts around 600 visitors, and on weekends, around 1,000—about the same as its pre-war numbers, pro-rated to account for the millions who fled the city last year. “It shows that people need to engage with culture, and we have a real role to play,” Björn Geldhof, curator and artistic director, tells me via Zoom from his office there.
From its website, Pinchuk Art Centre looks like any other cultural institution; one can find information on not just its regular exhibitions, but also café, bookstore, research library, and programming (including weekly lectures and art classes for children and people with disabilities). The only indications that it’s located in a country amid a full-scale war—well over 100,000 Ukrainians are estimated to have been killed in combat so far, and according to the United Nations, nearly 18 million Ukrainians are in dire need of humanitarian assistance—are the descriptions of a number of shows since the war began. Read More…
