2016 eng

The 2016 symposium was titled “Revealing”—aimed not so much at creating something new as at taking a closer look at what already exists. Participants worked with a space that preserves traces of time, gestures, and memory. Art projects revealed the visibility of what usually escapes human attention.

“Balance” (Nataliia Lisova, Anton Saienko), “Line 017” (Serhii Yakunin), “Observation of Three Unknowns” (Katia Buchatska). The landmark and symbolic work of the symposium was the intervention by Bohdan Babenko, Ganna Gidora, and Olha Zaloha, titled “SIGN.” This is a giant white chalk spiral—an image not only recognisable and deeply rooted in the visual history of Mohrytsia, but also one that directly refers to the beginnings of the symposium, when the spiral with flags became a symbol of the start of joint action, a ritual of entering the space.

This year, Stanislav Turina emphasised the theme of continuity within the Mohrytsia artistic tradition through his work “Hebra (daughter’s name)”—a reproduction of landmark projects from previous symposiums. The author literally repeats “White Path” (Oksana Krynychna, Oleh Karpieiev, Dmytro Zeziulin) and “Revelation” (Myroslav Vajda)—not as a reconstruction, but as a gesture of memory and recognition. In the catalogue, Turina calls this a “method of constructing the legendary”—an attempt to understand why a work survives in history and how it can be engaged with today.

For Turina, repetition is not a copy, but a way of making visible what continues to resonate. His phrase ‘perhaps it was an echo?’ appeals to the idea of echo as time that does not pass but returns. In this way, the symposium appears as an archive of living memory, where new interventions activate previous layers, and repetition becomes an instrument of the present.

This connection is expressed literally, through the line, as a form of interaction. The work “Balance” by Lisova and Saienko directly echoes the “White Path” of 2008, which crossed the river and has now, recreated by Turina, reappeared in the landscape.

The year 2016 in Mohrytsia is a year of dialogue with the past, when the landscape not only receives new gestures but also returns to those already made. It is an experience of how artistic tradition continues, not through imitation, but through the discovery of commonality.