The search for the ‘new’ is a definite symptom of art. Significant artistic trends included in textbooks and encyclopedias were often fueled by the ‘non-professional’, ‘peripheral’ discoveries of artists, and then appropriated, leaving no names or traces. Art still does not stop searching for a convincing form of expression. This process especially intensifies during periods of noticeable changes when means of expression are experiencing a crisis.
Can one talk about a certain process of decentralisation in the artistic field? How can we deal with the gap in the cultural representation of the conditional centre and periphery, and ultimately with division and hierarchy? Is there a historically and culturally sensitive way of dealing with the experiments of non-professional artists?
Finally, why are the animated films by the self-taught artist Anatolii Surma noticeable against the background of many other experiments, both amateur and professional? Why did the visual style of cartoons become the basis of this year’s festival identity?
Speaker:
Roman Bondarchuk is an art director of the Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, director of documentary and feature films, member of the Board of the Ukrainian Film Academy. Co-director of the almanac Euromaidan. Rough cut, which was included in the Best of Fests program at the IDFA festival in Amsterdam. In 2015, his first full-length work Ukrainian Sheriffs (2015) won the IDFA Special Jury Award and was selected as the Ukrainian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 89th Academy Awards. In 2019, Bondarchuk won the Shevchenko National Prize.
Moderator:
Evheniya Molyar is an art critic, DE NE DE artistic initiative participant. Evheniya works with the issues of preserving cultural heritage, and explores artistic processes in the context of decentralisation. She cooperates with numerous regional museums around Ukraine within the framework of the Under construction: Museum open project.
