In August 2017, the Municipal Gallery presented its project ‘The Petrel Song. A Short Course’ at the 5th Odessa Biennale of Contemporary Art. The main theme of the Odessa Biennale was ‘turbulence’ — a state of uncertainty and the absence of any long-term strategies. This theme resonated with Kharkiv, a city that has experienced numerous upheavals over the past century, which has inevitably been reflected in the work of various artists such as Vagrich Bakhchanyan, Serhiy Bratkov, Boris Mikhailov, Yevhen Pavlov, Hamlet Zin’kovskyi, Anton Tkachenko, and Vitaliy Kokhan.
The exhibition invited viewers to explore the evolution of artists’ responses to social change, starting with the ironic Bakhchanyan who laughed at everything around him, and moving on to the Kharkiv School of Photography, which presented an alternative view of Soviet reality. The audience then entered a somber, contemplative contemporary world reflected in the works of Hamlet Zin’kovskyi, Vitaliy Kokhan, and Anton Tkachenko. Finally, the narrative concluded with Vagrich Bakhchanyan, reminding us that any transformation requires the ability to laugh at oneself.
Interestingly, the project’s title references three significant literary works: the first is ‘A Short Course in the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)’, a textbook on the history of the Soviet Communist Party; the second is Maxim Gorky’s ‘The Song of the Petrel’, a hymn to communism; and the third, a hidden literary source that inspired the curator, was Vagrich Bakhchanyan’s play ‘The Seagull – The Petrel’, which was also present in the exhibition.
