In September-October of this year Kharkiv will be hosting the second national Biennale of Young Art. Over one and a half months, exhibitions, discussions and lectures will be organized at more than ten locations, many of which have never before hosted contemporary art projects.
The founder of the Biennale is the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine. The organizer in Kharkiv is the Municipal Gallery, the main organizational partner is PR agency Bagels&Letters. The project is organized with the support of the Ukrainian Culture Foundation and more than twenty other partners, with ILF among them, acting as a legal consultant to help establish a convenient model of interaction between the participants and donors of the project.
Biennale 2019 is entitled “It’s like I’m stepping into our garden”, with the project’s structure being a metaphor for the Botanical Garden: according to the organizers, they want to see where modern art is going to take root and give rise to new ideas, and where it’ll remain just a “one-year plant”.
The organizers have also promised interventions in the urban landscape. The first of them, exhibition entitled Makeshift Poster created by young authors from the Aza Nizi Maza studio (curators of the children's program at the Biennale) had only survived for a couple of hours. Our lawyers provided legal support to the organizing committee, resulting in an official reply from the Director of the Department of Municipal Property of the Kharkiv City Council, in which the official takes responsibility for the unintentional destruction of the exhibition.
The Biennale of Young Art is an opportunity to change the usual format of exhibitions - to go beyond art galleries and museums, discover new names in Ukrainian visual art and help them get noticed. In accordance with the regulations of the Ministry of Culture, any Ukrainian citizen between 14 and 35 years of age can take part in the competition.
The organizing committee received 390 applications from artists and art groups from all over Ukraine, as well as from authors living in Lithuania, Poland, Germany, France and the Netherlands. The curators - Darina Skrinnik-Miska, Anastasiya Yevseyeva and Boris Filonenko - selected 45 projects to be displayed in the main program of the Biennale. A number of other projects will be presented in side and children's programs. In addition, the Bienniale will have an extensive educational program.
Learn how cultural projects are created and how the art market works on our YouTube channel in the creative economy section: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa_7X2VvYks2hSfcm7O-BNGiawn4wyasG
The exhibition’s main organizer is the Kharkiv Municipal Gallery. The organizing committee is responsible for the external part of the event: selection of venues, communication with the participants, search for necessary funds as well as for partners and contractors.
The curators select works, set up exhibitions and communicate with the artists. The curators have mutual rights and obligations before each other and the organizers. Theirs relations must be regulated in separate contracts and memorandums. This helps clarify relations between various parties, agree on a common vision and prevent misunderstanding of key terms in order avoid potential conflicts or delays.
In the memorandum on the organization of the Biennale, our lawyers, under the leadership of Arsen Buchkovsky, outlined responsibilities of each participant, making it clear who is responsible for what in the project, what they are to do and how they interact with other participants. The signing of memorandums between the organizers and curators is already underway. We hope that this will provide the creators of the Biennale with clear guarantees of cooperation and an opportunity to work on the event’s preparation without distractions.
We would like to help turn the Ukrainian art market into a transparent and efficient system and convert abandoned factories and plants into creative spaces and innovative parks. Learn more about creative economy projects here: https://www.ilf-ua.com/ru/sfery/kreativnaia-ekonomika/
