2007 eng

The year 2007 was marked by a deepening engagement with performative and sculptural forms, which were increasingly combined. The creation of objects in space as acts of interaction with landscape, material, and time became not only a process of production but also a self-sufficient artistic gesture.

Dmytro Bozhenko created a surreal white “shadow” of a slender birch on a hillside, laying out its graphic outline in chalk directly on the grass. The artist moved along the slope, clearly visible from the opposite riverbank, as if performing on a stage. The joint work by Kharkiv artists, based on a project by Roman Minin and Maryna Beketova, also carried a distinctly theatrical character. Their brightly coloured windmill, erected on a hill, was the result of a coordinated collective action with playful elements.

The collective nocturnal performance “Playing with Light” (created in collaboration with Yurii Barannyk), in which participants worked with light tubes to form a choreographic composition in the darkness of the quarry, combined the plasticity of movement, the rhythm of gesture and striking visual effects. In his project “Signs on the Way”, Oleksii Malykh laid a long white ribbon of fabric along the quarry line, leaving markers and imprints upon it. The work inscribed spatial memory into the landscape. Olena Trubanova’s body art became one of the performative practices that activated the bodily sense of kinship with the quarry space. She invited participants to cover their bodies with chalk, transforming this into a conscious gesture of artistic immersion in the environment. This act reflected an experience already inherent in the symposium: owing to the particularities of the site, participants were almost constantly covered with a fine layer of white chalk. Here this state of physical interaction with space acquired symbolic meaning—as a form of belonging, inclusion and coexistence with the landscape.

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