Veronika Synenka/Tie2.lt

Olga Stein Kalinovska-Kravchuk is a Ukrainian artist, curator, and theatre designer; the founder and editor of the critical texts platform by text; and the author of the podcast “Hi it’s me, Stein”, dedicated to contemporary Ukrainian art. She combines her personal artistic practice with curatorial work in the artist-run space thesteinstudio, which she founded, organizes residencies, supports the art community, and creates an open space for dialogue and collaboration.

Hello, Olga! How are you doing? What stage are you at right now – creatively, internally, personally?

Hello, Veronika, you’ve caught me between installing the third exhibition of this month and preparing for the opening of the fourth. Obviously, I feel tired – between cities and access codes – but at the same time filled with a sense of final joy and immense gratitude for the opportunity to spend these generous four days at home.

At the same time, above all else, I am currently very much looking forward to returning to the residency in Riga. I was invited by TUR telpa, which made me incredibly happy, as their exhibition programme is simply remarkable. This invitation gave rise to a great love of mine – first for Riga, and later for Vilnius as well. I had the opportunity to travel a little through smaller Baltic cities, but I feel that I want to devote much more time to researching the local context. I am also planning to spend November in Riga, preparing for a project with LCCA. I am developing the idea for a project-performance involving taxidermied cutlery. I want to set the table and invite people to share this kind of dinner with me.

And next year I have an invitation to come to Lithuania with a project. At the moment I am somewhat drawn to theatre, so I want to use this opportunity to look deeper—not only into visual art, but also into the theatrical scene.

What does it feel like to be an artist and a curator at a time when Ukrainian art is receiving renewed attention?

Obviously, we are starting with difficult questions. I often feel my own inadequacy when so much horror and the economy of attention collide within a single sentence.

What does it mean to you “to be relevant,” considering your experience and your view of the contemporary art scene and market?

It is not about the market and not about the scene, but about a difficult and sharp contact with reality.

Which methods of promoting art in Ukraine do you think work today—and what still needs to change?

It is obvious that populism in politics, in art, and in pop culture relies on the same methods and principles, and I am becoming less and less interested in examining which stimuli or marketing tricks are directed where. What interests me more is what we ourselves define as the art we want to promote, and how this shapes the imagined “us.” Are we talking about a new Cultural Pavilion project, for example with Ai Weiwei, or about the exhibition Ukraine-WOW at a railway station, or about the story of Vasyl Stus at the Mystetskyi Arsenal, or about an apartment exhibition curated by O. Pogrebniak? Does the popularity of individual projects alone function as the promotion of the field as such, and which narratives do we abandon in order for this popularity to emerge? Does a universal “art in Ukraine” even exist—something that could be promoted at all?

How has the war and the change of context affected your artistic practice—not only in terms of themes, but also materials, techniques, and methods?

I have to admit something terrible: even now I can hardly remember myself and my practice before the war. It has lasted for so long in my life. Perhaps that is why death has become a fully fledged everyday partner and a medium of the creative process. I now work a lot with taxidermy; it is partly about an expanded possibility of living together with death.

In your recent works you use taxidermied animals. Why this particular medium, and how does it allow you to speak about the horrors of war?

Any romantic, excessive ornamentation or complex visual expression feels to me like an unacceptable distance. From a distance, you cannot look reality directly in the eye; instead, there is a dangerous romanticization and the making of assumptions. I have absolutely no need for that. While I still strive to remain an artist with a certain task in shaping images, I nevertheless seek maximum clarity. The factual presence of death tells me a great deal.

Tell me about the work “The Scenography of a Great Epic Does Not End with a Wedding.” What is its idea? Why did a wedding become the image of central significance?

At the same time, while preparing to work in the theatre, I read The Aeneid, some Euripides—The Trojan Women, The Phoenician Women, Iphigenia—as well as The Iliad in Borys Ten’s translation, and I finished with Kotliarevskyi’s Aeneid. These texts were perfectly suited to the island environment, whose territory unfolded for me through their pages—about the role of women in the heroic epic and about what happens to heroes after the war. And then, unexpectedly—Mike Johansen’s The Journey of the Learned Doctor Leonardo and His Future Beloved, the Beautiful Alcesta, to Slobozhan Switzerland. All of this together was partly about the play of cultures, appropriations, an inspiration to approach such irony and humor when comparing these cultures, and, most importantly, a play with plot for the sake of the “landscape.”

Here I am referring to Mike Johansen’s postscript in the story about Doctor Leonardo. The author quotes the prologue and admits that the entire novel was a “book of landscape.” The novel itself is a kind of deception: the reader believes they are learning the story of the main characters, but in the end the author states that the novel had all along been nothing more than a description of nature.

Later I thought a great deal about the distant and the near heroic epic, the distant and the near war, about myths, the end of the hero and exalted love—and about what circumstances are, and where there might be room for life and celebration within them. And about which “landscape” I see my own plot unfolding in.

I wrote a drama—a heroic epic about Lot’s wife, Lot’s daughters, abandoned (occupied) land, about Juno, Dido, and others, and about the search for men during an endless war. Text, and especially the writing of drama, has long been part of my practice; for example, at my first solo exhibition in London, the foundation of the exhibition was precisely my drama.

The text ended—and at the same time did not end—with a wedding. Although an attentive reader might understand that the entire text was written only, as the author jokingly suggests, for the sake of the wedding scenography—already hinted at in the epigraph.

Later, for a group exhibition in Limassol, while working with the text, I created a scenography for a wedding that never took place. The form of the installation table is the familiar U-shaped wedding table, crowned with a ceremonial wedding bread. It is a metal, non-functional construction, in which the central sculpture is a broken table covered in silverware assembled like metal armor; inside it, crowned, lies a dead taxidermied bird.

Wedding bread is associated with many rituals. Somewhere between my fascination with table setting, etiquette, and traditions, I discovered a custom of killing one of a pair of birds—species that mate for life—and preparing a wedding cake from the hunt.

For me, this is a very cruel allusion to the eternal waiting for a celebration that may never happen, and to the perspective of looking at war from the position of life, and at life from the position of war.

You mentioned that in your practice you often “serve the space.” Why did you choose this particular term, and what does it mean to you?

I like how much the word “space” can contain, and how controversial the word “to serve” is. It is about greater intimacy, closeness, and contact with something; it also problematizes and allows one to notice the non-obligatory nature of certain processes, to mark what seemed linear and obviously expected as a subjective aspect of space.

I curate the artist-run space thesteinstudio, where I recently laid asphalt myself, repainted the walls before the next exhibition, and took care of the flowers nearby. It feels like more than a practice of care or even curatorship. I am a woman who takes care of a home, and all these processes—preparing, serving, fixing lighting fixtures, moving a sofa—are often reflected in my practice.

I am a co-founder of by text (a platform that supports the emergence of critical texts about contemporary art), and I believe that around all these initiatives there exists a community, which I also imagine as an imagined space—one with which I am truly in a relationship, investing both body and soul.

In art, I am drawn to a site-specific approach, to subtle gestures, their certain interior-like quality, quietness, penetration, and diffusion into the local context.

Is art for you a way to ask questions, to reflect, to transform—or more a means of communication? How do you see it?

I think art is everything.

At the moment, what is your priority in work—the process or the result?

A sense of state.

Despite the fact that you are first and foremost an artist, you also founded an artist-run space. Tell me what motivated you at the beginning and how the format has changed over the past years.

thesteinstudio is an artist-run space that I founded before the war, oriented toward working with the community, educational initiatives, the realization of my curatorial practice, and the promotion of mid-level collecting, without a permanent exhibition program. The war rearranged people, places, and possibilities, highlighted suffering, and revealed the necessity of a somewhat different—more institutional—structural approach to survival.

thesteinstudio—I believe it is a project that formed absolutely naturally in a place that cannot remain empty for long, because that is the nature of the Ukrainian art field’s landscape. Describing this “gap” is a long story that I repeat from interview to interview; if you allow, this time I will simply point to what I have done and what I continue to do, because I cannot not do it. I do not have children, so I cannot say for sure whether this instinct feels exactly like that, but in my inner imaginings I see it as a kind of inclination.

As for the programme, over the past year a solo residency format has appeared in the studio’s activities, as well as a performative programme that is very important to me, with a strand of lectures and workshops, in addition to exhibitions themselves. And, of course, every exhibition is a great value to me—a lesson and a reassurance that without it, it would be much harder for me in Kyiv.

What main goals are you setting for this space now, and how are they connected to the relevance of Ukrainian art?

It is important for me to rethink the task before composing the programme for each year, but each time it is an attempt to understand what contemporary Ukrainian art is, and what it is important to speak about right now. To remain needed and to be responsible for that is very important to me.

How do you choose artists and projects for exhibitions? What criteria and philosophy stand behind these choices?

I compose a constellation of ideas that I want to work with in the coming year and look for those who, through their honesty and integrity, can be important interlocutors for me.

In your opinion, what is the role of art during wartime—to simply exist, to bear witness, to effect change, or something else?

Each time I try to find an appropriate justification, but I have never found one convincing enough to become a long-term answer to this question. I have certain situational beliefs, but for everything and for the long run—I do not know. A great deal of romance and strategic thinking disappears when you come face to face with evil.

What does hope mean to you? How does it manifest in your work today—and is it “relevant”?

I have an entire series of mother-of-pearl sculptures created while thinking about the form and meaning of hope—about how nacre forms around an injury to a mollusk’s body as a form of protection. I can say with certainty that, despite all the subsequent pain caused by hopeless hope, it is still better with it than without it.

How do you see the future of Ukrainian art—both in Ukraine and beyond its borders?

Unfortunately, I see it as still being a zone of turbulence and speculation, which is very saddening, because one would like to imagine at least some points of support for a possible future. For now, all of them are grounded more in my faith in God than in plans, strategies, or structures of support.

The project “Cultural Bridge: Lithuania–Ukraine” is partially funded by the Media Support Fund.