The AIL – Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab Vienna will host, together with the Office Ukraine, an evening of conversations with curators, artists, and researchers from Ukraine, reflecting on exhibition making amidst war, ways of practicing with at-risk institutional archives, and the role of the artist as a witness.

The programme will feature a curatorial introduction to the exhibition projects from the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture (DCCC) and Asortymentna Kymnata, Ivano-Frankivsk.

Venue: AIL, Ehemalige Postsparkasse (Former Austrian Postal Savings Bank), Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna

»Everything for Everybody«, 18:00
Conversation with the Curators of the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture

The first part of the evening addresses the theme of heritage under threat, the precariousness of archives, and the ways in which artistic practice can resist destruction while fostering new forms of collective memory.

Curators Kateryna Rusetska, Victoria Donovan, and Natasha Chychasova, together with colleagues from the Pokrovsk Historical Museum, Tetiana Kostiuchenko and Anhelina Rozhkova, will discuss the research foundations of the exhibition »Everything for Everybody«, developed for the Kyiv Biennale 2025 in collaboration with the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture (DCCC).

The exhibition framework consists of archival sources from the Franki Raffles Photography Collection at the University of St Andrews, and the photographic archive of Mykola Bilokon, preserved by the Pokrovsk Historical Museum. Raffles’s »Soviet Women« series documents labor and gender across the late Soviet Union in 1989, while Bilokon’s photographs portray everyday life in Pokrovsk during the collapse of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s early independence.

In 2024, Pokrovsk was destroyed by Russian bombs, forcing the evacuation of the museum’s collections. The exhibition traces this story of fragility and displacement, bringing Bilokon’s archive into dialogue with Raffles’s images to reflect on how we document and remember places that are endangered or erased entirely.

»Do Toads Sing in the Walls?«, 19:30
Conversation with Olga Poliak and Alona Karavai, curators of Asortymentna Kymnata, Ivano-Frankivsk

The second conversation turns to »Do Toads Sing in the Walls?«, a project developed by Asortymentna Kymnata in Ivano-Frankivsk, which established a dialogue between artists serving on the frontline and those remaining in civilian contexts.

Curators Olga Poliak and Alona Karavai will present the project through photographic documentation of exhibitions first realised in February 2025, alongside close readings of selected works from the exhibition they brought to Vienna from Ivano-Frankivsk.

Guest speaker Klementyna Kvindt, drone operator, poet, and ornithologist, will join via Zoom to share her reflections on displacement, resistance, and service in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

The title comes from the song Evening of Toads by Stanislav Krul and colleagues, written with the help of AI.

Live Sound Performance by Anton Lapov, 21:00

The evening will end with a live sound performance by Anton Lapov (Anton Makarevych), a Ukrainian media artist, computer musician, and curator. Lapov is the coordinator of the media-art collective Art Cluster R+N+D and founder of the digital record label BOCTOK.

The programme is initiated by Office Ukraine Vienna in collaboration with the Kyiv Biennale and Asortymentna Kymnata, with support from ERSTE Foundation. It will continue on 14 November at mumok Kino with a special screening programme curated by the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture and Asortymentna Kymnata. Following the critically engaged, itinerant format of its 2023 edition, the 6th Kyiv Biennial will once again unfold across multiple locations throughout Europe. This year marks the Biennial’s 10th anniversary and sees it co-organised by L’Internationale – a European confederation of museums, art institutions, and universities.

Header image: Franki Raffles, Women Workers in the USSR, 1989. Courtesy of the Franki Raffles Archive, University of St Andrews.