Kostiantyn Doroshenko/Tie2.lt

Art historian, theorist, and contemporary art curator Olga Balashova is Chair of the Board of the NGO Museum of Contemporary Art. Since 2020, this initiative, working in collaboration with a broad circle of experts, has sought to establish such an institution in Ukraine. In 2023, the organization founded the Ukrainian Museum of Contemporary Art / UMCA — an innovative network structure designed to bring together Ukraine’s public and private art institutions and collections on a voluntary basis.

In my view, the concept of a contemporary art museum as a network proposed by your NGO is particularly well aligned with how the representation of art should develop today. But perhaps I am simply drawn to the decolonial vision of moving beyond hierarchies. How has your vision of the mechanisms for implementing this idea changed over the years as you developed and refined it?

Perhaps our approach resonates with you also because you were part of the expert community in which this idea emerged in 2021 — the idea of a decentralized museum, a museum as a network. One of the important changes I see in Ukraine today is precisely connected with the emancipation of thought — the gradual rejection of hierarchies that were imposed on us from outside. The very idea that there should be some kind of center that knows better than everyone else what is important and what should be represented seems extremely strange.

Ukraine is a very large and highly diverse country. Strong centripetal and centrifugal processes are taking place simultaneously. We have a strong tradition of horizontal self-organization — I think the war has simply made it much more visible. Our idea for the museum grew out of this understanding almost intuitively. At the time, we asked ourselves a fairly simple question: what should a twenty-first-century museum of contemporary art actually look like in a country such as Ukraine? And today, five years later, it increasingly seems to me that the answer could hardly have been any different.

Of course, our understanding of the network has changed considerably over these years. Initially, we thought of it primarily as a way of decentralizing the institution, so that important art could remain where it was created. Now we understand that simply having several museums in different cities is not enough. Today, what matters to us is not so much decentralizing professional expertise as decentralizing the very right to decide what has cultural value and what deserves to be seen.

So I would say that we are constantly testing our initial hypothesis against reality. So far, reality has tended to confirm it, but at the same time the idea keeps becoming more complex. Because it is one thing to devise an elegant abstract model, and quite another to allow reality to transform it

The UMCA pilot project is now taking shape not as a virtual initiative but as a physical institution in Vinnytsia. How is this process unfolding?

Yes, and it is no coincidence that we are testing this model specifically in Vinnytsia. In Ukraine, the city is often referred to as the “cradle of decentralization”: it has a strong tradition of municipal self-government and, particularly important for us, an ambition to develop models that could potentially work in other cities as well. This makes it an interesting process unfolding at the intersection of the interests of the professional museum community, municipal governance, and the local art community.

We have completed the first major stage of research into artistic processes in Podillia. Interestingly, the local art community decided that it was important to look beyond the artistic processes of the city of Vinnytsia alone — our partners, the NGO “Plai,” chose to take responsibility for the entire Podillia region. As a result, six months of research led to the first attempt to map and describe the region’s artistic communities, histories, archives, and networks. It is precisely from this research that the future institution is gradually emerging.

We have called the next step “Museum before the Museum.” Essentially, it will be a prototype of the future museum, created before it has a permanent building. For several months, we want to activate all of its core functions — an exhibition program, a library, an open archive, a cinema, as well as educational and public programs — and see how they work in a real city with a real audience. This is important to us because we want not only to explain to residents why the city needs a contemporary art museum, but also to give them an opportunity to experience directly what such a museum means and perhaps even influence what this institution will eventually become.

We have just been selected for funding under the state program “Tysiachovesna” and received financial support to implement part of this project, so it is now moving from the research stage into implementation. In parallel, an architectural competition is underway, which we are organizing in cooperation with UNESCO. The city has allocated the building of a former cinema in central Vinnytsia for the future museum, and the competition is intended not only to find a way to reconstruct it, but also to explore what the architecture of an institution of this kind should be. We plan to select the winning proposal by the end of the year. At the same time, another, less visible but perhaps no less important part of the work is underway: we are developing a legal and governance model that will allow a municipal institution to become part of the broader UMCA network while retaining its autonomy.

In Vinnytsia, you are working with the local authorities. To what extent is it possible to maintain a balance between freedom of artistic expression and research, on the one hand, and the authorities’ interest in tangible, ideologically aligned symbols of their achievements, on the other?

So far, we have hardly had to seek this balance. The city is very invested in the project, and at this stage we have its trust and support, as well as considerable freedom of action. But I have no illusions that this will always be the case. Once the museum becomes a permanent institution and begins engaging with topics that may be uncomfortable or at odds with the city’s official image, tensions will inevitably arise. That is why it is important for us now not only to maintain good relations with the authorities, but also to embed the museum’s autonomy into its very structure. A publicly funded museum must be accountable to the community while remaining independent of the prevailing political climate. And perhaps the real test of this model will come when the museum does something the city disapproves of — and that disagreement does not undermine their relationship.

This year, you launched another ambitious project — Prytoka, the first aggregator of contemporary art collections in Ukraine. By creating a national catalogue of public and private collections on a single platform, it has the potential to provide both us and the world with an unprecedented wealth of visual and analytical information. How does the platform work? Who has supported it so far?

For now, the platform is operating in pilot mode. Its curator, Larion Lozovyi, has developed a collection management system that is highly complex in its internal logic yet remarkably simple for the user. The task itself sounds quite straightforward: to bring together in one place Ukrainian contemporary art that is currently scattered across state museums, private collections, and family collections. But it was important for us to work not only with images. Behind every image is a specific artwork — with an owner, a location, a history, and documentation. If a researcher or curator comes across a work on the platform, they should eventually be able to find out where it is and contact its owner regarding an exhibition, research project, or publication. If we succeed in implementing this system on a full scale, I believe it could fundamentally change the way people work with Ukrainian art. Today, searching for artworks for research or an exhibition often resembles detective work: you need to know the right people, write dozens of emails, and sometimes you do not even know whether a particular work has survived or where it is. We want to make this heritage visible and accessible for professional research and curatorial work. We are currently in discussions with both museums and private collectors, and there is considerable interest. But this immediately reveals an infrastructure problem: many Ukrainian museums simply do not have enough staff or resources to properly digitize their collections. So creating the platform alone is not enough — we also need to think about how we can help museums prepare their data for it.

Private collections present a different problem. In July, a draft law was introduced in the Verkhovna Rada aimed at regulating the non-state segment of Ukraine’s Museum Fund and private collecting. This revealed a fundamental issue: if regulation makes owners fear additional scrutiny or liability, it does not make private collections more visible — on the contrary, it drives them further out of sight. For our project, which is based entirely on trust and voluntary participation, this is a crucial issue. Negotiations are currently underway, and I hope this draft law will be withdrawn.

At present, in addition to the UMCA collection, the Prytoka platform features part of the contemporary art collection of the Odesa National Fine Arts Museum, as well as the collection of the Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnychenko Museum-Workshop. But for us, this is only the beginning.

Speaking of the UMCA collection, what kind of works do you select for it?

We began building the collection after the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022. At the time, we saw many important works created at an exceptionally dramatic moment in our history almost immediately begin to find their way into private and museum collections, often outside Ukraine. We realized that we could not wait for the museum to be established first and only then start collecting. We secured some initial funding and began acquiring works. At present, we collect works created after 2022. We are interested in how the experience radically transformed by the war is changing artists’ own artistic language, ways of thinking, and their expression of how they perceive reality. The selection of works is connected to another of our long-term projects — the Wartime Art Archive. We describe this work as curatorial monitoring: we continuously follow what is happening in art, document the process, and try to understand which works, over time, prove to be essential.

Incidentally, over the past two years we have made almost no new acquisitions because we currently do not have dedicated, stable funding for the collection. This is also a very practical reminder that building a museum collection is not merely a curatorial decision, but a long-term institutional responsibility.

In 2023, the exhibition “Ти як?” (“How Are You?”), organized by your team at the Ukrainian House, became the first large-scale presentation of works by Ukrainian artists created during the intensive phase of Russia’s war against Ukraine. It also became a kind of social catharsis. A large curatorial team immersed the viewer in a visual polyphony encompassing the spectrum of emotions experienced by our society. Yet this approach has become something of a trend in Ukraine: a broad circle of curators and the widest possible presentation of diverse works. Do you not think this disperses the curator’s responsibility for the exhibition narrative? Where is the line between polyphony and cacophony?

I often return to that exhibition — sometimes I even walk through its 3D tour. From today’s perspective, it seems very romantic to me, even naive, but at the same time extraordinarily important. At the time, we genuinely did not care about making a curatorial statement. The exhibition had no narrative other than the sequence of events following February 24, 2022 — a sequence that, it seems, every Ukrainian can still reconstruct today. What mattered to us was presenting a polyphony of experiences. Or even a cacophony — because the exhibition itself moved from the silence of the first days to the moment when everyone begins speaking at once. Our most important decision was not to place the artists’ experience above that of the viewers or curators. More than a hundred participating artists, the curatorial team, and the people who came to see the exhibition were all living through the same historical experience. In a sense, we were all trying to cope with the same sense of shock and utter bewilderment, for which, at the time, there simply was no established language. But I agree that this model has its limits. What was a justified gesture in 2023 should not automatically become the method for every subsequent exhibition about the war.