The Odessa Museum of Contemporary Art presented three exhibitions on the war

The Odessa Museum of Contemporary Art has opened three new exhibitions. The exhibitions by Ivan Petruk, Serhiy Melnychenko, and Alex Hetman explore the human experience of the present through the themes of war, memory, body image, and internal conflicts.

Intent correspondents attended the events.

According to the curator of the exhibitions, Anna Morokhovska, at first glance, these three exhibitions seem very different, but they all engage with the human experience 

“Together, these are three distinct artistic languages through which we view reality and how it changes a person,” she noted.

In the exhibition“ABOUT THEM,” Ivan Petruk explores the extent to which the person others see—
— aligns with who that person is to themselves. In his graphic and painted portraits, the artist focuses on the gaze, posture, body language, and traces of past experiences.  

Serhiy Melnychenko’s exhibition “Evidence of Life” brings together three projects created in the context of the full-scale war in Ukraine: “Tattoos of War,” “Along the Dnipro,” and “Reels from the Front Lines: Photographs, Letters, and Artifacts of Ukrainian Soldiers.”

At the heart of the exhibition is photography as a form of testimony. In various projects, the artist works with the body as a vessel of memory, documents the daily lives of people in different regions of Ukraine, and hands the camera over to the soldiers themselves to capture their lives. 

In the project “Ecstatic Singularity,” Alex Hetman uses physicality and sexuality as a means
to explore the self and one’s own boundaries. Human bodies in the works multiply, overlap, twist, melt, and dissolve. The more explicit the expression becomes, the more difficult it is to recognize a specific image. 

Earlier in Odessa, the exhibition “Ode to Sonia” opened, dedicated to the 140th anniversary of the artist Sonia Delaunay, who was born in the city. The exhibition features reimagined patterns and rhythms in plates and vases, experiments with textiles and simultaneous prints, and neon posters.
 

Юлія Калабайда