The “Borderland Space” symposium has existed for over a quarter of a century since 1997. For 25 years in a row, every summer, a group of artists came to the village of Mohrytsia in the Sumy region of Ukraine to create an art laboratory in an open space without institutional or market restrictions. Artists worked with the environment and embodied their ideas in land art and interdisciplinary projects up until 2022. The symposium became the basis for the formation and close interaction of the artistic community from different regions of the country. It was also the only large-scale event in the field of modern art in the Sumy region.
“Mohrytsia is a special phenomenon, free from visual social transmissions but completely subject to the dictates of space. This space seems to have been designed for creative dialogue: mystical hills, unreal chalk stone quarries and an unstoppable winding river. Every time Mohrytsia joins the artistic process with fog, rain, dew, or wind. It offers an extremely wide mineral diversity for earthen art — clay, chalk stone, sand, black earth…”
Art expert Yevheniia Moliar, an article for the 15th anniversary of the symposium
“Arriving in Mohrytsia, on the territory of the borderland, is always a rather tangible calibration of optics and a meeting with everything that inevitably loses clarity in the conditions of “civilization.” As incomprehensible as the origin of ball lightning, a parallel life unexpectedly opens its pages before you, inviting and warning at the same time. Both in the dimension of everyday human existence and in relations with the extra-human. Here, one can constantly feel the relationship of different scales, the proximity of the prehistoric and, at the same time, of something that cannot be measured by time at all. When the chalk stone underfoot is the bottom of the ancient sea raised to the surface of the earth by a glacier. When for two weeks, the sky, which, in the city, is usually just a patch with torn contours on the periphery of vision, becomes two-thirds of your landscape from morning to evening, with a break only for spending the night in a tent.”
Art expert Natalia Matsenko, an extract from her piece “Where the Lightning will Strike,” 2021
Every year, Prostir Pokordonia presents reporting projects, representations of land art in gallery spaces, group or personal reinterpretations of environmental art, and presentations of the land art symposium in various gallery spaces: Sumy Regional Art Museum, Sumy City Gallery, AkademArt Gallery, BureauArt Gallery, ArtProstir Gallery on Teatralna Street/Sumy; Kharkiv Municipal Gallery, YermilovCentre/Kharkiv; Khmelnytsky Regional Art Museum; Vinnytsia Regional Art Museum; Dzyga Art Gallery, Gary Bowman Gallery, Lviv Municipal Art Centre, Jam Factory Art Centre/Lviv; Yuriy Barannik Gallery/Zaporizhia; CSM Sovart, ART-KYIV contemporary Mystetskyi Arsenal, GOGOLFEST festival, Triptych Art Gallery, Bottega Gallery, Spilne Gallery in 3.6.9 Space Kyiv; National Centre Ukrainian House, The Naked Room Gallery/Kyiv; exhibition space at the Rovore estate/Ivory Coast, France, Notgalerie gallery/Vienna, Austria
At various stages, the Lendart Symposium collaborated with:
the Sumy Regional Council of Deputies, the Sumy Regional State Administration, the Sumy District Council of Deputies, the State Administration of the Sumy District, the Sumy City Council of Deputies, the Executive Committee of the Sumy City Council, the Mogrytska Village Council, the Myropilska Village Council, the D. Bortnyansky Higher School of Arts and Culture, Sumy Branch of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation, Ukrainian Cultural Foundation, Velyka Idea Program Spilnokosht Platform, International Renaissance Cultural Foundation, Swiss Cultural Foundation Pro Helvetia, Stabilisation Fund for Culture and Education of the German Federal Foreign Office and Goethe-Institut, the Botanical Garden of V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, the Directorate of the Institute of Cultural Strategy in Lviv, the Association of Art Galleries of Ukraine, the Stedley Art and Shudra Art Collection foundations, and the KomenergoSumy enterprise.