(Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art. Meeting 2

11:00-12:00 Svitlana Rybalko Japonism in Ukrainian Art of the Late 19th – First Third of the 20th Century

The subject of the seminar is to highlight peculiarities of Ukrainian Japonism: from the Japanese pavilion in the village of Samchiki, the structure of its painting and sources of “oriental” motifs, to Ukrainian porcelain and the representation of pastoral East. Professor will also address the image of Madama Butterfly and the iconography in portraiture at the beginning of the 20th century. The relations between Japanese artistic heritage and the development of the Ukrainian national style will be analysed. One of the sources for this interconnectedness was the presence of Ukrainian Artists in Japan in the 1920s, resulting in the pieces that give the material for discussing the representation of the country and its inhabitants in the mirror of modernism. Finally, the role of Japonism in the system of academic education will be investigated.

12:10-13:10 Oksana Barshynova Ukrainian Avant-garde: Crossroads of Innovations
The Ukrainian avant-garde is part of the world's innovative movement. At the same time, it relies on its own traditions and is conditioned by local context. Deprived of statehood, Ukraine in the early 20th century became not so much a centre as a kind of "laboratory" where ideas were born and forms of new art were worked out. In the 1920s, Ukraine gave bright examples of a mature avant-garde, which manifested itself in constructivism and progressive art education. During the seminar, various artistic centres (Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson region, etc.) will be analysed as locus for producing innovative concepts. The avant-garde in Ukraine included not only Ukrainian but also Jewish, Polish, and Russian artists, whose ideas and artistic practice later influenced the development of Eastern European art of the 20th century.

Svitlala Rybalko is a researcher, Member of AICA (International Association of Art Critics), member of IAJS (International Association for Japanese Studies). She defended her PhD thesis on Cultural Aesthetic Universals of Classical Japan and their Reflection in the Art of Tokugawa Epoch (Painting, Graphic) in 2001. She received her habilitation with the subject Traditional Japanese Clothing as the Representative Model of Japanese Culture in 2013. Rector of the Kharkiv School of Architecture, Head of the Department of Humanities and Art History of the Kharkiv State Academy of Culture. Author of over 200 publications.

Oksana Barshynova, Deputy Director of Exhibitions at the National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU, Kyiv), is an art historian, curator, lecturer and researcher. Her research interests are the history of Ukrainian art from the second half of the 20th century to the present, collecting and exhibiting contemporary and modern art, and regional and decolonial studies. She is a codeveloper of the new concept for exhibiting art of the 20th century and a curator of many exhibitions of contemporary art at NAMU. In recent years, she has headed teams for exhibition and research projects at the museum. She was a researcher at the Musée d'Orsay and the Centre Pompidou, Paris (PAUSE Programme) in 2022.

For the participaton online via Zoom, please follow this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7475586652?pwd=dlRpMUJxTEVuVXAzcnQyR0FuU1FIQT09

Scientific Organization: Oleksandra Osadcha