ARSENALE 2012 Commissioner, Nataliia Zabolotna and Artistic Director, David Elliott announced the list of artists and highlights of works to be included in the main programme for the upcoming first Kyiv Biennale. Under Elliott’s title ‘The Best of Times, The Worst of Times. Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art’, the Biennale will display 250 art works by over 100 international and Ukrainian contemporary artists, including 40 new works to be made especially for the exhibition. All of the works will be on display in the historic Mystetskyi Arsenal from 24 May until 31 July 2012.

NEW WORKS

Exciting new works to be featured at the Biennale include Footprints of Eternity, a new site-specific immersive installation byYAYOI KUSAMA. Flanked by two large new paintings, the installation will be specially made for the Biennale by the Japanese artist. Kusama will also present an earlier reflection box work entitled Aftermath of the Obliteration of Eternity (2009).

British artist PHYLLIDA BARLOW will create Rift, a new three-part site-specific work with hoardings, industrial elements and “bombs” that will respond to the massive columns, vaults and military history of the imposing Arsenal building.

Indian artist JITISH KALLAT will also be creating a new work for the Biennale, a walk through installation comprised of the projection of a letter written in 1939 from Mahatma Ghandi to Adolph Hitler, urging the Dictator “for the sake of humanity” to avoid war.

A new series of large images of factories by BORIS MIKHAILOV (born in Kharkiv, Ukraine) will both liberate and capture the superannuated power of the era of Soviet heavy industry which has scarred vast tracts of the Ukraine. The images feature behemoths of iron and steel that dwarf the few surviving workers projecting bittersweet memories of construction and sacrifice into an anti-heroic present.

American painter FRED TOMASELLI will presenttwo new large apocalyptic works he has made especially for the Biennale. Corresponding to the theme of the exhibition, they reflect the Gothic underbelly of a society spinning out of control.

MAJOR INTERNATIONAL ART WORKS

Recently on display in major world capitals, the Biennale will also present Chinese artist AI WEI WEI’s large-scale installation Zodiac Heads/Circle of Animals, a series of twelve bronze animal heads depicting figures in the Chinese zodiac and based on 18^th century sculptures designed by Jesuit Court artist Giuseppe Castiglione. Originally created for the Old Imperial Summer Palace on the outskirts of Beijing, these heads were looted and destroyed by British and French troops in 1860.

Three cell works from 1992, 1998 and 2006 by French artist LOUISE BOURGEOIS will also be shown. These enclosed installations include arrangements of both real and symbolic objects and indicate one of the main themes of ARSENALE 2012: the past is both a prison and a source of creative liberation.

Referring to the infamous Nazi exhibition of 1937, JAKE & DINOS CHAPMAN present an updated view of ‘Degenerate Art’ in their exhibition of large ‘childish’ cutouts viewed by a grotesque skeletal public dressed in SS uniforms and branded with smiley faces.

The First Kyiv Biennale will display these works alongside work by prominent contemporary artists from Ukraine including ILYA & EMILIA KABAKOV, OLEG KULIK and BORIS MIKHAILOV. Ilya Kabakov (born in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine) will present his vast installation Monument to the Lost Civilisation. This workpulls apart the system that ruled over Russia, Ukraine and many other states for over seventy years. The contrasting visions exposed by the Kabakovs of official and interior life during the time of the Soviet Union will show in the artists’ words “…a dream, a wonderful paradise where everything works [and]…completely the opposite. It is depressing, pessimistic about the future, life is miserable. It is a crazy combination of everyday life and the paradise constructed by propaganda.”

ARSENALE 2012 will explore David Elliott’s elaboration of the first words of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities that was set at the time of the French revolution: “It was the best of times, the worst of times”. Onone level this considers how contemporary art needs the past to express the future, but in another way it looks at how the past, has become like a prison and that it is now necessary to break down its walls. The main exhibition has been conceptualised around four non mutually exclusive hub ideas: The Restless Spirit looks at the way we drive strength from beliefs, myths and cosmogonies unfettered by material needs; In the Name of Order examines how under the pretext of rationalism, power attempts to dominate culture through the creation of self-serving hierarchies;Flesh takes the frailty and appetites of the human body as its central theme and The Unquiet Dream focuses on nightmares and premonitions without which we are unable to develop or change.

David Elliott, Artistic Director of the main project, said

“Most exhibitions made today are Eurocentric in their assumptions and relations to the art market. While not rejecting this, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times tries to present another picture, one that also takes into account the political and aesthetic developments that have shaped so much art of the present. In doing this the still reverberating impact of the cultural policies of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong are no more neglected than the much longer established but still vitally evolving aesthetic traditions of Asia, the Islamic world, Africa, of course Europe (and North America), and elsewhere and how these are impacted upon by contemporary life. Such influences as these and many more feed into the level platform we call contemporary art.”

Nataliia Zabolotna, Commissioner of ARSENALE 2012 and Director General of Mystetskyi Arsenal said:

“ARSENALE 2012 will make it possible for the Ukrainian audience to see a huge range of top international contemporary art for the first time. The main exhibition of ARSENALE will contain work by some of the best-known 20th and 21st century artists, none of which has ever been displayed here before. Ukraine has changed dramatically over recent years, people here feel like they are more integrated into the global community and want this to be reflected in the inclusion of Kyiv in the international contemporary art world.

For ARSENALE 2012 we hope that the free thought and innovative ideas of the artists on display will inspire audiences visiting the Biennale and shed light on the state of the world at present.”

Confirmed List of Artists

About David Elliott

David Elliott is a curator, writer and cultural historian, who has directed some of the most innovative and dynamic museums of modern and contemporary art worldwide. He curated the 17th International Biennial of Sydney in 2010; established and headed Mori Art Museum in Tokyo; was the director and curator of the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, Moderna Museet (The National Museum of Modern Art) in Stockholm and Istanbul Modern Museum.

About Nataliia Zabolotna

Nataliia Zabolotna is the Director General of Mystetskyi Arsenal, founder and publisher of the leading Ukrainian art magazine ART Ukraine. She is also the author and Director of various successful annual art projects: ART KYIV, the first and only contemporary art fair in Ukraine, Great Sculpture Exhibition, Great Antique Exhibition, Fine Art Ukraine and The Independent exhibition.

CATALOGUE

A fully illustrated 350pp. catalogue will be published to co-incide with the exhibition with texts by David Elliott, Bojana Pejic, Bruce Ferguson and extracts from the work of Isaac Babel, Mikhail Bulgakov, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens and Nikolai Gogol.

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