ISCP TalkJune 28, 2022, 6–7pm
Artists at Work: Pavlo Grazhdanskij with Volk Lika and Anton Varga
For Artists at Work, ISCP’s current resident from Ukraine, Pavlo Grazhdanskij, will speak with Volk Lika and Anton Varga.
In their conversation, they will discuss working with archival and found materials, countering online disinformation, gathering evidence as an art practice, artistic agency during war, and which artistic medium makes sense (if any) in times of crisis.
Pavlo Grazhdanskij researches strategies of representation from the perspective of Ukrainian culture. He addresses problematics of documentary and found material; artistic approaches and manual labor in data processing and collection; dead-ends and turns of logics of sustainable states; biopolitics; reproduction techniques of existence, including themes of cycles, traditions, rituals, fate, authoritarianism, insuperability, and survival strategies; and abstraction, collaborationism, and intentionality. Grazhdanskij has exhibited at Detenpyla gallery, Lviv; Sörnäinen public bomb shelter, Helsinki; and Rosa’s House of Culture, Saint Petersburg among other venues.
Volk Lika is an artist, and organizer based in New York. In 2020 she organized The Always Fresh art space in the foreclosed pizzeria on the Lower East Side of New York and in 2019 founded Cultural Capital Introspection international program (USA-UA), supported by the American Embassy in Kyiv. She is a recipient of the fellowship of Queens Museum Studio Program, Flushing, NY, and and American Academy in Rome finalist. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Art and Design, NY; Queens Museum of Art, NY; PERFORMA, NY; Luminary, St. Louis; the Ross Art Museum in Ohio; and Knockdown Center Gallery, Brooklyn.
Anton Varga is a visual artist and curator born in Uzhhorod, Ukraine, who received his M.F.A. from Kharkiv Academy of Design and Arts, and, since 2015, has been based in New York, NY. As co-founder and member of Open Group, he was a participant of the pavilion of Ukraine at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and curator of the pavilion of Ukraine at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019).
This program is supported, in part, by AES+F; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; New York City Council District 34; New York State Council on the Arts and the New York State Legislature; The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; and William Talbott Hillman Foundation.