Curator Marta Czyż and Open Group artists Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach and Anton Varga have received from the Minister of Culture and National Heritage Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz the decision for their project Repeat After Me II to participate in the 60th International Art Exhibition in Venice. As the result of a long-term collaboration between the curator and the Open Group artists, the selected project will be presented in the Polish Pavilion.

The project ‘Repeat After Me I’I is an attempt to show the cruelty of war without the use of drastic visual means. The video’s participants – civilians who were temporarily displaced from different regions of Ukraine to a camp for war refugees in Lviv share their memories and knowledge of the sounds of war.

To bring the audience closer to the experience of witnessing the war in Ukraine, the creators use the concept of karaoke – a popular musical entertainment from Japan. However, the accompaniment is not familiar hits, but gunshots, cannonades, howls and explosions, and the lyrics are descriptions of deadly weapons. Through the form of the project, the creators draw the audience into interaction, attempting to break down the passivity in which the audience finds itself as listeners to war stories.

Open Group is considered the leading collective of the last decade of contemporary Ukrainian art. The group consists of Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach and Anton Varga. The artists are two-time winners of the prestigious PinchukArtCentre Prize, as well as scholarship recipients of the Gaude Polonia programme. They participated in four exhibitions at the Venice Biennale in 2015, 2017 and 2019.

Open Group’s works have been presented in many exhibitions both in Poland and internationally, including at the Labirynt gallery, the Arsenal gallery (during the collective’s five-year anniversary), the International Cultural Centre in Krakow or the Łaźnia in Gdańsk.

Adrian Andrzejewski