Artistic Kharkiv is primarily associated with the avant-garde of the 1920s and the Kharkiv School of Photography, which emerged in the early 1970s. A significant link between them is the figure of Vahrscha Bakhchanyan (1938–2009), who called himself an “artist of the word” and, without exaggeration, became the center of the underground artistic and literary life of Kharkiv in the 1960s. Personally acquainted with the outstanding constructivist Vasyl Yermylov, Bakhchanian expanded the boundaries of the artistic work, engaged in visual poetry, and experimented with non-artistic (from the point of view of socialist realism) techniques. He became the inventor of the term “sosrealism” (satire on “social realism”) and became famous for his absurdist phrases, which immediately became popular. With his direct participation, in 1965, the first unauthorized street exhibition in the USSR was held in Kharkov, after which the artist was forced to leave his native city and go first to Moscow, and later to emigrate to the USA.
At the lecture, we will talk about Bakhchanian’s work in the context of the artistic life of post-war Kharkiv, both official and unofficial, about the connection of his ideas and practices with the work of Mykhail Semenko and Vasyl Yermylov, as well as about the influence on the artistic environment and subsequent generations of Kharkiv artists.
🔸Lecturer: Oksana Barshynova – art critic and curator, deputy general director of NAMU for exhibition work. She is known as a researcher and popularizer of Ukrainian contemporary art, consistently deals with issues of its museification, archiving and preservation. Curator and co-curator of such landmark museum projects as “Ukrainian New Wave” (2009), “The Myth of “Ukrainian Baroque” (2012, together with Halyna Skliarenko), “Tetiana Yablonska. And memories and dreams” (2017) and many others. She has vast experience as a lecturer both in museums and educational institutions (NAOMA, KAMA, others) and well-known educational projects, for which she developed author’s courses of lectures on the history of art of the second half of the 20th – early 21st centuries.
🔸 June 14 (Friday) at 17:00
🔸 Price: full ticket – UAH 250, discounted ticket (schoolchildren, students, pensioners) – UAH 150.
🔸 Registration here.
📌In case of an air raid alert, we ask all visitors to immediately go to the shelter. The nearest shelters are located at street Khreschatyk, 4 (underpass near the Dnipro Hotel) and at the Maidan Nezalezhnosti metro station.
📌 Please note that the lecture is canceled in the event of an air alert. Visitors who have already purchased tickets at the museum ticket office at the time of the announcement of the air alert can use them to attend any other lecture within the museum lecture hall.
❗️ IMPORTANT: You can get to the museum through the service entrance located at the back of the building. To do this, you need to go around the museum to the right along Museum Lane.
