Office Ukraine, Olia Fedorova, Svitlana Zhytnia

For the third event of the Tuesday@Secession series we cordially invite you to an evening in the garden of the Secession. Apart from contributions to the program by new members of the Secession, for this evening, Office Ukraine with the artists Olia Fedorova and Svitlana Zhytnia has been invited to contribute to the event series.

8 p.m. – Office Ukraine. Shelter for Ukrainian Artists

Office Ukraine. Shelter for Ukrainian Artists was set up for Ukrainian artists and cultural workers in all disciplines seeking shelter in Austria shortly after the beginning of the war. It serves as a liaison between them and the Austrian art scene. As part ofTuesday@Secession, Office Ukraine will briefly introduce the organization and its work.

All persons, initiatives and institutions who want to express their solidarity with and support Ukrainian artists are invited to contact Office Ukraine, where they will be connected with artists from Ukraine.

Office Ukraine was brought into being in cooperation with the civil society, the BMKÖS, tranzit.at, the BMEIA, < rotor >, Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, springerin, and other initiatives.

9 p.m. – Olia Fedorova

On 24 February 2022, the day of Russia’s invasion, many turned to God with their prayers. For the performative poetry reading Ukrainian Prayer, Olia Fedorova has composed her own invocation emerging from what she used to send to God herself and what she heard from other Ukrainians praying. This evening, she will perform these words in public for the first time intending for people to “hear it too, to feel what we feel, to understand what we understand –what the war actually is”.

Olia Fedorova (born in 1994 in Kharkiv, Ukraine) is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist who works with performance, photography, video, and text. In 2016, she graduated from Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Fine Arts.

She is a finalist of Non Stop Media VIII Contemporary Art Festival (Kharkiv, 2016); finalist and winner of the Nathan Altman Contemporary Visual Art Contest (Vinnytsia, 2016 and 2017); finalist at MUHi (Kyiv, 2017) and at the Second Biennale of Ukraine’s Young Art (Kharkiv, 2019). Olia Fedorova has had solo exhibitions in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Dnipro, Odesa, Ivano-Frankivsk and Turin and participated in artist residencies, group exhibitions and projects in Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Austria, Great Britain, Spain, Argentina, Japan and the USA. Currently, she is based in Graz, Austria.

9 p.m. – Svitlana Zhytnia

As a result of Russia’s massive invasion in Ukraine, death became for many more tangible, existential and evident. In her work To the Living, Svitlana Zhytnia contemplates on the cycle of life and death and how it affects all living beings. Abstract shapes and figures depict the beginning of life, a walk through urban landscapes, its changes and transformations, whilst finally leading to an ultimate collapse. The soundscape moves along with the visual composition and emphasizes the emotional layers of change. The artist invites the audience to meditate and feel for the people whose lives were taken by destructive power.

Svitlana Zhytnia is a digital media artist from Kharkiv. She works in the field of generative art, develops video animations through visual coding and experiments with footage in real-time. Through her artistic practice, she collaborates with sound artists, musicians, theater directors, and live performers creating transdisciplinary, immersive, and visual experiences.

She performed live at the Mapping Festival 2022 in Geneva, developed visuals for a multimedia dance performance in collaboration with Max Schumacher for Post Theater in Berlin and created a real-time audio-visual experience for the Frontier-VR ArtFestival in Kyiv. Further, she has taken part in music festivals in Ukraine as a VJ and developed video art for electronic music producers in the US.

Both of the artists’ contributions are individual works, but are presented simultaneously and intertwined with each other