From February 24 to March 1, the “Fluxus Time” project will be presented at the Municipal Gallery.

The Fluxus-style exhibition* reconstructs Fluxus projects and presents video and computer presentations. Fluxus will enter Kharkiv’s art space through Iryna Danylova’s lecture-presentation “Fluxus Time” and a screening of an excerpt from Jeff Perkins’ new (still unfinished) film “George Maciunas”. Among the artists are Kharkiv-born Vagrich Bakhchanyan, Valery and Natasha Cherkashin.

* In the late 1950s and early 1960s, avant-garde artists were searching for new means and forms of self-expression. Fluxus, as an art movement, emerged from these aspirations and became a platform for interaction among artists working in different parts of the world on the same question: how can art and everyday reality be united in a continuous flow of creativity?

The name “Fluxus” (from the Latin fluxus — “flow, movement”), coined by George Maciunas, emerged during the development of one of the movement’s printed publications. Later, it came to be associated not simply with a group of artists, but with the philosophy of life of an entire generation which, in opposition to the pathos of modernism and the commercialization of art, proposed complete freedom of creative expression and a deliberately simple form of artwork, sometimes even rejecting it altogether.

The aim of the Fluxus art movement is to merge various means of artistic expression and communication into a single “flow”: concrete and electronic music, visual poetry, movement, and symbolic gestures. Its fundamental principle is absolute spontaneity, arbitrariness, and the rejection of all restrictions, achieved through such forms as happenings, décollage, various street actions, and performances.