Picture this: the Ukrainian-built airplane Mriya (a “dream” — literally) flies low over the Giardini Gardens, casting a shadow over the pavilions of the Venice Biennale, the oldest international art exhibition. Prided as the world’s largest operating aircraft, Mriya carries a single cargo — the list of all Ukrainian artists, or all who see themselves as such.
Four of these artists, called the Open Group, have thought up this act to represent Ukraine at the 58th Venice Biennale this year. They curated the Ukrainian national pavilion and gave it a poetic title — “The Shadow of Dream (Mriya) Cast Upon Giardini Della Biennale.” Some 1,140 other names on the list are considered the participant artists in the project.
With the sun at its zenith on May 9, the opening day of the Biennale, the world’s artists, critics, collectors and other visitors to the extravaganza looked to the skies to see the 285-ton Ukrainian aircraft fly over their heads. But the plane never even took off.
In the six months of preparation, the Open Group and Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture, who commissioned the project, could not convince the state aircraft company Antonov to fly its Mriya airplane to Venice and back.
“The Shadow of Dream got lost in the offices of Kyiv,” the Open Group said in a statement after the flight did not happen as planned.
And yet the curators carried on by redefining the purpose of the project. It was not the flight itself, they said, but the myth around it that sparked the viewers’ reflection and discussion about the issues the performance raised. And the state’s failure to fly Mriya exposed more problems that need to be addressed.
Battling the hierarchy
“The dwarf in art judges the giant.” This is the way Arsen Savadov, the teran Ukrainian transavantgarde artist, reacted on Nov. 16 to the news that the Open Group, and not him, will represent Ukraine at the Venice Biennale.
The giant is what the 56-year-old artist called himself in relation to the members of the Open Group, who are between 29 and 31.
“The Shadow of Dream” by the Open Group defeated Savadov’s project and seven others at the national competition for the Biennale on Nov. 15. Savadov disagreed with the contest’s seven-member committee, saying that his project would be more worthy.
Among other things, Savadov criticized the Open Group’s project for being too difficult to implement: besides organizing the flight, the Ukrainian side had to get permission from the Italian authorities to fly low over Venice, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
On Jan. 28, 23 representatives of the art community, including artists Oleksandr Roytburd and Oleg Tistol, who were also part of the Ukrainian transavantgarde movement in the 1990s, wrote a letter to the Ministry of Culture demanding it cancel the victory of the Open Group’s project.
On Feb. 13, crowds of protesters rallied by the Ministry of Culture and the Cabinet of Ministers with the same demand. The Ukrainska Pravda news website reported that these people were not related to the artistic community, and were saying that they knew from “open sources” that the Open Group’s project cannot be implemented.
However, “The Shadow of Dream” had the support of another segment of the Ukrainian artistic community, especially its younger members. Artist and critic Nikita Kadan calls the Open Group’s performance method “the first throw” that provokes further actions by other players.
The central element of the project on board of Mriya — the hard disk drive with the names of all people who perceive themselves as Ukrainian artists — exposes the artificial ways in which the hierarchy of Ukrainian artists is formed due to the absence of a conventional history of Ukrainian art, Kadan says.
“The Open Group performs a gesture of cancelling the hierarchy as such, making the struggle for the top of any hierarchical pyramid senseless. The hierarchy asserts itself by replacing history with myth. The artists of the Open Group expose the mechanism of this substitution,” Kadan wrote on May 8.
Coincidentally, just as “The Shadow of Dream” by the Open Group was selected to represent Ukraine at the Biennale, Savadov tried to impose his own project instead by the right of the hierarchy.
At one point, Savadov said he will call Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to “settle the issue.”
Interpretations
Savadov must have felt disheartened when Poroshenko publicly supported the Open Group’s “bold and ambitious” project and said that it’s happening after all. The triumphant announcement came two weeks before the first round of the presidential elections, which Poroshenko would eventually lose.
“The Mriya airplane with the information about Ukrainian artists on board will fly over Venice. This way Ukrainian art will powerfully assert itself at the 58th Venice Biennale of modern art,” Poroshenko wrote on his Facebook on March 14.
In Poroshenko’s view, the flight of Mriya would be triumphant and patriotic, a power move by a young country that is becoming stronger while fighting Russian aggression. He calls the performance a part the “cultural front.”
After all, the Ukrainian Mriya would have also cast a shadow over the Russian pavilion. It’s the same pavilion that was financed by Kyiv philanthropist Bohdan Khanenko in 1913, but transferred to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Ukraine still doesn’t have its own pavilion and has to rent one every Biennale.
Similarly, even before its launch, the project had acquired many other — and often contradictory — interpretations.
“Some see jingoistic declarations, others — a caustic irony about them. Some see a sad admission of weakness (if only about the national aviation industry or the artistic historiography), others — the advantage of weakness over strength. Some see ‘a strong gesture,’ and others see defeat as a way to reveal the true state of things,” Kadan wrote.
But since Mriya didn’t fly after all, some of the more positive interpretations of the project were automatically eliminated.
“This work now covers more issues that are deeper, more dramatic. There were no happy endings, no imperialistic victories over everyone else,” Anton Varga, a member of the Open Group told The Kyiv Post.
Why Mriya didn’t fly
The Open Group says it can only guess whose fault it was that the plane didn’t fly. At the same time, Varga says they were given promises that the flight would happen by the Ministry of Culture, the Antonov state aircraft company and Ukroboronprom, the state defense industry conglomerate.
Deputy Minister of Culture Svitlana Fomenko, the commissioner of the Ukrainian pavilion at the Biennale, told theBabel news website on March 14 that the Ministry talked to Ukroboronprom and Antonov about renting the airplane. She also said that the Italian authorities allowed a flight at an altitude of two thousand meters. The Kyiv Post reached out to Fomenko for comment, but did not get a response.
On March 25, the Antonov company finally refused to provide the aircraft, Varga says. The Open Group then tried to look for other flight options to no effect, before finally deciding to redefine the project as a myth that leads to public discussion.
For six months until Nov. 24, performers at the Ukrainian pavilion at the Biennale will retell the myth of the Mriya’s flight over the Giardini gardens of Venice. The story of “The Shadow of Dream’s” creation will be documented and published along with the criticism of the project.
“It’s a whole different project now. It revealed so much about how our society, art and government function and interact,” Varga says.
