Open Group

Open Group (formed 2012, Lviv) is a Ukrainian conceptual artist collective comprised of Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovoch, and Anton Varga. The wide ranging practice of Open Group has seen the collective exhibit around the world, including solo exhibitions across Europe and a recent interactive video work shown at Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York.

Sonya: A Sunflower Network presents a video piece entitled Repeat After Me (2022) which is the centerpiece of the exhibition. A note on the piece from Open Group:

“A few weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion, the State Emergency Situations Service of Ukraine started distributing a multipage manual on how to behave in the area where military actions are happening. The order and type of action severely depends on whether the attack involves assault rifle fire, artillery shelling, multiple rocket launcher shelling, or even aerial bombardment. Very often, the only way to distinguish the type of fire is to determine different weapon types by sound.

“The video participants are civilians in a camp for war refugees in Lviv, temporarily relocated from different regions of Ukraine, sharing their memories and expertise in the sounds of war. They, reproducing various types of weapons, 

conduct a kind of karaoke instruction, which, while transmitting simple sound sequences, is still unable to convey the experience that exists nearby, the experience that has become the price for this knowledge. This knowledge is a new reality for Ukrainians; possessing it helps to survive.

““From the moment we hear the first air raid siren, our ‘internal alarm’ is on alert. It keeps us in constant tension and makes us listen to every sound, every rustle. Sometimes suspicion creeps in even in silence.””

In addition, Sonya shows two large scale photographs by the collective. After participating in the Venice Biennale as artists in 2015, Open Group were selected in 2019 to curate the event’s Ukrainian Pavilion - but in a fashion typical of the collective, they subverted the customary pavilion set-up. Instead, Open Group sent out an open call for all Ukrainian artists who wanted to participate, and loaded the work of those thousands of artists onto a hard drive. The hard drive was subsequently suspended inside “Mriya,” or “Dream,” a Ukrainian aircraft which was the largest plane ever built. At noon on May 9, 2019, “Dream” flew over Venice, casting a literal shadow on the Biennale in honor of all Ukrainian artists who had been largely overlooked by the art world, and in protest of their exclusion. From their curatorial statement:

“As a reminder of those [Ukrainian artists] who were excluded, half-manifested, or even could not dream, we decided to cast a shadow on the Giardini della Biennale to remind us of all those other shadows that fall upon it, upon the global market, and upon the entire system of the colonialism of contemporary art.”

Sonya is proud to present two photographs documenting this remarkable project - one photo of “Dream” being prepared in its hangar, and another of the hard drive suspended inside the cargo hold. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, these photos have taken on new significance: On February 24, 2022, the first day of the invasion, “Dream” and its hangar were destroyed by Russian forces in the Battle of Antonov Airport. In May, President Zelenskyy announced plans to build a new “Dream” - these plans were confirmed in November.

Read more about Open Group’s project at the Venice Biennale here: http://open-group.org.ua/en/