SEE : UA – connecting landscapes

SEE:UA - connecting landscapes

Sat 10.08.2024, 19h: Talk
20h: Live DJ-Set l MQ Summer Stage, Main Courtyard l Free entry

The talk with artists and curators Natalia Matsenko, Clemens Poole, Yuri Yefanov, Reinhold Zisser from the SEE:UA - connecting landscapes project and Sasha Horbiatuk from Office Ukraine will discuss how Seestadt is becoming an experimental art laboratory for Ukrainian artists. They will explore concepts of landscape, urban transformation, displacement and home, while focussing on the significance of land art and the development of new living spaces.
Afterwards, Anton Lapov and Clemens Poole will present a live DJ set.

 About SEE:UA – connecting landscapes:
This summer and fall, Seestadt will become a large experimental art laboratory for a community of Ukrainian artists and their colleagues exploring concepts of landscape, urban transformation, displacement, and home.
The invited actors fulfilled central artistic positions in the Land Art Symposium Mohrytsia, one of the most important land art platforms in Ukraine, which connects artists across different generations. In 2022 the symposium was canceled due to the Russian invasion, and in 2023 it was still unsafe to hold it in, the village of Mohrytsia, as it is located only five kilometers from the Russian border.
The curatorial team consists of Natalia Matsenko, Yuri Yefanov, and Clemens Poole.
Together with Reinhold Zisser, who is responsible for the overall concept, this group encounters Seestadt, the largest urban development area in Vienna.
Following on the Notgalerie project, a basis has been developed at this location over several years of practice, allowing, in 2024, for the construction site, the art areas, and the transition to the Seestadt living space to function as a large experimental laboratory. In this Land Art Laboratory, we will examine the significance of the Seestadt landscape, its site-specific quality and, in this reflection, attempt to arrive at the significance of the site and the landscape as a carrier of the concept of home.
With regard to the site-specific quality, we ask the question of what it means when the emergence of a new living space takes place as a tangible transformation process, through the change from original nature, to fallow land and fields, to the building site and finally to the new district. These different stages exist simultaneously in Seestadt and merge into one another.
At the same time, we take on the challenge of investigating the concept of Land Art itself. In addition to the historical definition coined in America in the 1960s, we are concentrating on its significance of the present moment, which will be practically realized through an emphasis on the project as a shared social event. The proposed community will be fostered over the course of the summer of 2024 in Seestadt between the Ukrainian artists, the Viennese cooperation partners, the operators of the construction site, the residents of Seestadt and, of course, the art and culture audience.

Anton Lapov (Ukraine) is an artist, musician, independent curator and museologist. His practice follows a multidisciplinary approach based on his interest in new media, sound-art, creative coding, digital humanities and experimental museology. He is constantly in search of non-conventional forms of exhibitional representation and seeks to avoid the logic of instrumentalisation through the creation of procedural communicative situations. In addition to being involved in the sphere of artistic/curatorial production he also conducts research into the history of Ukrainian sound-art/electronic music and local artistic communities of Eastern Ukraine. Lapov will play a DJ set specifically constructed from the tracks and the music by Ukranian and, especially, Eastern Ukrainian electronic musicians.

Clemens Poole (USA) is an artist, musician and curator. He has worked with the Ukrainian context since 2014 and lived in Kyiv full time since 2019. His works generally investigate and discuss topics relating to Ukrainian contemporary culture and its positionally in a global context. Since 2022 he has been an active proponent of Ukrainian noise and experimental music and its evolution following the full scale invasion. He is a co-founder of the experimental music label Kyivpastrans Records, and curator of the ongoing Drones for Drones compilations series. He is also a frequent performer and organizer within the Kyiv noise scene.
Poole will perform a live set as Selective Softener, an experimental noise project blending elements of noise, industrial, metal, techno, and other musical referents.

SEE:UA – connecting landscapes is supported by following sponsors and partners:
KÖR Wien, Stadt Wien Kultur, BMKÖS, aspern Die Seestadt Wiens, bruno&marone, SUPERBUDE

Office Ukraine. Support for Ukrainian Artists was founded just a few days after the start of Russia's large-scale war of aggression against Ukraine on 24.02.2022, in violation of international law. The initiative supports Ukrainian artists of all disciplines who fled from Ukraine to Austria to escape the Russian invasion.
The aim of the organisation is to bring Ukrainian artists who need support into contact with those who offer support, to enable them to continue their artistic work
in their respective fields and to promote long-term artistic collaboration between artists from Ukraine and the Austrian art scene. Office Ukraine, which has three locations in Vienna, Graz and Innsbruck, was founded in cooperation with the BMKÖS (Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport), civil society, tranzit.at, < rotor > Center for Contemporary Art, Künstler:innenhaus Büchsenhausen, springerin and other initiatives.