2017 eng

The year 2017 marked the twentieth anniversary of Borderland Space. The theme “Crossroads of Time” simultaneously highlighted two dimensions in which times intersected at the symposium. On the one hand, it concerned the meeting of the modern and the prehistoric, which took place in Mohrytsia through the interaction of artworks with ancient landscapes and their archaeological layers. On the other hand, it addressed the meeting of the times of the symposium itself: experiences, ideas, and discoveries accumulated over twenty iterations, combined with new meanings, methods, questions, and reflections that entered the project alongside its dynamic transformations.

In the works created at this “temporal crossroads,” artists drew symbolic boundaries and measurements within the landscape, inextricably linked to its temporality, such as Anton Saienko (“Hyphen”), Vitalii Kokhan (“Geodesy”), Roksolana Uhryniuk (“Border”), or Yaroslava Maistrenko (“Border. Flicker”). Participants reflected on the historical past of the cretaceous plateau, such as Liusia Ivanova (“Pangaea”), Olha and Oleksandr Zaloh (“Fish”), Viktoriia Kalashnikova, Natalia Mykhailychenko, and Viktor Hrynko (“Chronology”), or Oleksii Malykh (“Devil’s Finger”), a work depicting the ghostly outline of a belemnite—an inhabitant of the Mesozoic sea that left traces of its presence throughout the Cretaceous strata of Mohrytsia’s past. Some focused their objects, interventions, or performative actions on the fluidity of time or on the contrast between transience and stasis, which Mohrytsia’s space invariably evokes. This could be observed, for example, in Marharyta Zhurunova’s and Bohdan Lokatyr’s (“Reservation”), Yurii Vyshniakov’s (“Filling”), and Yehor Antsyhin’s (“Movement”) works. Others recorded reflections on the abstract, the elusive, and the speculative, and their encounter with material reality in the landscape, such as Vitalii Kokhan, Bohdan Lokatyr, Liuba Malikova, Anton Saienko, and Stanislav Turina (“Abstract Digging”), or Katia Libkind (“Backstage of a Land Art Film”).

Reflections on cosmogony and the passage of time on an astrophysical scale were embodied by Ganna Gidora in her work “The Sun in Taurus.” She added the image of the sun to the monumental “Taurus” on the chalk slope, created together with Oleh Kokhan in 2014. Since its creation, the work has been updated year by year, remaining a constant—a kind of talisman of the symposium, a calm and unmoved witness to the changes and the flickering of light across days and years.