Concluding our look back at 2016, we focus on two exhibitions featuring prominent Kharkiv conceptual artists: “Vagrich Bakhchanyan – The Word Artist. A Restoration Project” and Hamlet Zinkivsky’s “Polaroids. Diary.”
In 2016, the Municipal Gallery initiated a long-term historical and educational campaign to “return” Bakhchanyan to his homeland. This year saw the first official exhibition of the word artist in Kharkiv. As the project was titled “restoration,” its participants attempted to recreate the atmosphere of the time when Bakhch lived here. The program included home concerts, tribute actions by young artists, a tour by Max Rosenfeld titled “Bakh’s Places and Myths,” the premiere of Andrey Zagdansky’s film “Vagrich and the Black Square,” lectures, and discussions. Young Kharkiv artists conducted a sticker action – restoring the first unofficial courtyard exhibition in the USSR, which Bakhchanyan and his friends had initiated in 1965, in one of the courtyards on Sumskaya Street. And in the Municipal Gallery itself, the exhibition from the family collection of Irina Bakhchanyan (New York) and private collections opened simultaneously in the main hall and in the ARTbasement.
Earlier, in the main hall of the MG, Hamlet’s exhibition “Polaroids. Diary” took place. The exhibition featured 365 Polaroid photographs, one for each day of 2015 (a reference to Bakhchanyan’s iconic project). At the end of each day, the author chose one photo and transferred the image to paper with a pen and ink. The works were arranged in chronological order. Interestingly, for this exhibition, the walls of the gallery were painted a deep black.
With such an unexpected color scheme and two such bright and important exhibition projects, the Municipal Gallery began a two-year renovation, completely changing its appearance and signifying a certain conceptual reboot of the gallery…
