Film and video from Ukraine: a video-gallery on the country's video production at MAXXI

From May 3 to 15, MAXXI in Rome offers a video gallery curated by Mykola Ridnyi and Alessandra Troncone entitled Chain Reaction. Film and Video from Ukraine. Starting with a documentary style, the exhibition helps to return an articulate and multifaceted look not only at Ukrainian video production but at a country that Europe feels even closer to today.

“When we started working on this project in 2021, the goal was to present the first focus on contemporary Ukrainian art in Italy, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence (1991),” the curators tell. Chain Reaction aims to remark, in the contemporary context, the independence of Ukrainian cultural and artistic production through the voices of some of its protagonists of the last generation.

Piotr Armianovski(Donetsk, 1985) | Uli Golub(Kharkiv, 1990) | Dana Kavelina(Melitopol, 1994) | Oksana Kazmina(Yakovlevo, 1984) | Zoia Laktionova(Mariupol, 1984) | Oleksiy Radynsky(Kyiv, 1984) | Mykola Ridnyi(Kharkiv, 1985) | Daniil Revkovskyi(Kharkiv, 1993) and Andriy Rachinsky(Kharkiv, 1990) | Ruins collective [Elias Parvulesco(Kyiv Region, 1985), Svitlana Pototska(Chernihiv, 1976), Teta Tsybulnyk (Kyiv, 1987)] | Anna Scherbyna(Zaporizhia, 1988)

Conceived as a fluid narrative between past, present, and future, the review brings together a selection of films and videos presented in sequence as in a chain where different themes intertwine and refer to each other, in a possible play of internal references that shows each work implicitly connected to the other. The sequence opens with a bird’s eye view of the Zamglai reserve, one of the largest swampy areas in Ukraine, and closes with a dystopian-perhaps prophetic-image of an apocalyptic scenario from which human presence has disappeared; general themes emerge from this “chain reaction” that meet and follow the international debate (the effects of climate change, gender issues), but also intertwine with events and aspects more specifically related to the Ukrainian socio-political context: the war in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that broke out in 2014, massive labor migration toEU countries, the struggle of human rights, feminist demands and the LGBTQ movement against far-right militants, urban transformation, the ecological issue.

For all information, you can visit MAXXI’s official website.

Pictured: Piotr Armianovski, Sloviansk, 2014-2018

Film and video from Ukraine: a video-gallery on the country's video production at MAXXI

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.