Culture - Power - Commerce
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| free of charge |
| German |
| Hall 1, Ground Floor |
| Belongs to: Post/Socialist Palaces |
Far from Berlin, the palaces of culture in Bucharest, Kyiv, Prague, Sofia and Warsaw have stood in urban spaces for decades. After the worldwide change at the beginning of the 1990s, the use and acceptance of the large buildings changed massively. The video installation “Culture – Power – Commerce” captures this change. With their works, the contemporary video artists Dora Huiban (Bucharest), Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei (Kyiv), Haruna Honcoop (Prague), Voin de Voin (Sofia), and Karolina Pawelczyk (Warsaw) show their personal view of the palaces of culture in their cities. Today, many palaces are commercial buildings for events, places for art and culture or seats of parliament and are thus used in a completely different way than intended by their builders. The videos paint a contemporary and artistic picture of the cultural, architectural and civic use of the buildings.
Haruna Honcoop is a Czech-Japanese filmmaker, graduate of the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), where she is currently a PhD candidate writing about Chinese independent documentary film. Her film essay Built to Last – Relics of Communist-Era Architecture (2017) was awarded the Archfilm Lund festival prize. Her short film True or False (2016) won a prize at This Human World festival in Vienna. Olympic Halftime, a documentary film that deals with the architecture and urbanism of Olympic cities in Beijing, Tokyo, Paris and Athens, as well as the German-French co-production Annexions will both premiere in 2023. She is currently developing a new documentary film I Am Taiwanese about the political identities of Taiwanese and Eastern Europeans.
Collaborating at the intersection of visual art and cinema since 2013, Kyiv-based artists and filmmakers, Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk graduated as cinematographers from the Kyiv National Theatre, Cinema and Television University. Through their films and video installations, they explore the image of the crowd, as a separate character in history and culture. They were awarded the main award of the PinchukArtCentre Prize (2020), VISIO Young Talent Acquisition Prize (2021). Their debut documentary feature “New Jerusalem” received the Special Mention Award at Kharkiv MeetDocs. Their video works are in collections of Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Frac Bretagne, and Fondazione In Between Art Film. Khimei and Malaschuk are members of the art group Prykarpattian Theater which is currently working on the project Theater of Hopes and Expectations.
Karolina Pawelczyk is a visual artist. She creates multilayered, performative and narrative spatial installations using video, sculpture, sound and other media. Her works analyze the paradoxes of modernity and the tension between the need to find new forms of political and ethical action (that would be appropriate to a technologically mediated world) and the inertia of our established and algorithmized thought patterns.
She is a graduate of Photography at the University of Arts in Poznań and Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She is a member of the New Centre for Research and Practice and collaborates with the Office for Post-Artistic Services.
Her works have been shown at the Zachęta National Art Gallery in Warsaw, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Arsenal Municipal Gallery in Poznań, the Short Waves Festival in Poznań, and as part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in Amarante (Portugal), among others. She also participated in the ING Polish Art Foundation Mentoring Program (2021) and was a finalist of the 19th Hestia Artistic Journey.
Voin de Voin (born 1978) lives and works in Sofia. He completed his master’s degree at Das Arts – Institute of the Advance Research in the Performing Arts and his bachelor’s degree at Gerrit Rietveld Academy and also obtained a diploma from SNDO- School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam.
Since 2016 he has been running the independent art space Æther in Sofia together with Marie Civikov, with an outpost in The Hague – Æther Haga. Æther is a partner of Schloss Solitude Academy, Stuttgart, the Eastern European Networks extension and exchange program between 2018 and 2021. He also organizes and curates SAW Sofia Art Week, which has been held annually since 2016. Together with Dutch curator and educator Lisette Smith, he founded a platform for alternative education, School of Kindness, since 2020.
Voin de Voin works in various fields of visual arts, from performance to installation, incorporating his research on collective rituals and human behavior, gender studies, ancestral knowledge, psychogeography, sociology, and parapsychology. He celebrates art as activism. His work has been shown in institutional and non-institutional spaces, art fairs, performance venues, festivals, museums, public spaces, and nature around the world.
In 2023, his anti-war activities in Bulgaria confronted various civil society constructs such as marriage, prison, and media censorship. He also participated in a group exhibition in Munich organized by the Rosa Stern Art Collective, participated in the parallel program of the Kochi Biennale in India and had an exhibition at the Clearing Gallery in New York, the Macedonian Opera and Ballet in Skopje and others.
Dora Huiban, born 2000, is an emerging artist, who lives in Bucharest, Romania. She graduated from the National University of Arts Bucharest. Currently, she is pursuing a master’s degree in Visual Arts (Photography and Dynamic Image). Her projects explore the connections between habitats and inhabitants (how do they influence each other?), focusing on metamorphosis and contamination. Since childhood, she has been intrigued by fantasy realms, which serves as a main source of inspiration. Her artistic practice involves large-scale installations with found objects, photographs, experimental films or recorded performances.