I am not here to be stronger than you

3 May to 1 June 2023
Opening Wednesday 3 May, 6.30—9pm

Exhibition featuring Alyona Tokovenko & AntiGonna
Curated by Daša Anosova and Alexandra Tryanova

TW: Due to themes explored within this exhibition, the content is suitable for adults only. Content includes violence, sexual violence and substance abuse.

The first major presentation of works by Ukrainian artists Alyona Tokovenko and AntiGonna in the UK. In the exhibition, autobiographical narratives are manifested through the acts of (auto)eroticism, transgression and pornographic imagery incorporating painting, sculpture, installation, video, and viscerally embodied live art. Hurt and injured bodies are presented in the gallery space through moving images and morphing canvases. Pain as a visual language, and a key theme of the artists’ works, addresses the politics of the current moment.

Alyona Tokovenko and AntiGonna are bright representatives of a new generation of Ukrainian women artists working with transgressive practices, radical intimacy, and personal traumatic memories. The artistic thinking of both artists develops through the media of live and fine art, keeping them deeply interconnected and letting painting become a part of their performative action. Taking up autobiographical fragments from their personal histories, Tokovenko and AntiGonna delve into a dialogue on their methods of breaking oppressive power streams. The title of the exhibition quotes Belgian poet and artist of Ukrainian origin Sophie Podolski from her major oeuvre ‘Le pays où tout est permis’ (1972). Radically denying hierarchies, this phrase resonates deeply with the whirlpool of identitarian cliches the artists’ and curators’ explored during the ongoing war in Ukraine and their immigrant statuses, proposing a poetic response to current challenges of hierarchical power, displacement, limits of strength, instant demand for competition and self-explanation.  

The exhibition gathers together the most recent large-scale acrylic paintings by Alyona Tokovenko, made during the artist’s residencies since Alyona’s displacement to Europe in April 2022. At the heart of the show is a body of moving image works produced by AntiGonna in Kyiv, while also in exile, reflecting her traumatic witnessing of the horrors of war, her vision of Kyiv's underground life and her stance regarding larger socio-political processes. Highlights include AntiGonna’s and Alyona Tokovenko’s collaborative performance piece presented at the Mimosa House space during the first weekend of the show, as well as the public programme running in parallel under the auspices of the Perverting the Power Vertical event platform based at the UCL FRINGE Centre for Cultural Complexity.

The exhibition is curated by Daša Anosova and Alexandra Tryanova - Ukrainian researchers of Ukrainian art and culture and recent immigrants to the EU and the UK. They consider the show being a collaborative project of all four participants.

Poster and visuals design by Nikolay Karabinovich.

Presented at Mimosa House, the exhibition and the public programme are supported by the University College London FRINGE Centre for Cultural Complexity.

Bios

Alyona Tokovenko

Alyona Tokovenko (born in Odesa, Ukraine; based in Paris) is an artist working across mediums including painting, installation, sculpture, but also video and performance, exploring questions of trauma and fetish and its flow in our consciousness and memory.

In 2022-2023 Alyona was a resident of Cité Internationale Des Arts in Paris and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. She currently studies at the fine art department at École des Beaux-arts at Mimosa Echard`s studio.

AntiGonna

AntiGonna (born in 1986, Vinnytsya, Ukraine; based in Paris) is an independent filmmaker, artist and trash model who focuses on questions of fear, violence, death and sexuality expressed by narrative post-porn and body-horror moving images; she works with a form of experimental documentary combined with a music video, live art, photography and VR.

Her works were exhibited at Castello di Rivoli Museo (Turin); Haus der Kunst (Munich, Germany); Moderna Museet (Stockholm); Cité Internationale Des Arts (Paris); Arsenal Gallery (Białystok, Poland); PinchukArtCentre (Kyiv), but also became a part of the screening programs at 56th edition of Tampere film festival and 33-rd edition of Fid /Marseille.

Daša Anosova

Daša is a researcher and cultural worker from Kyiv, Ukraine. She is the 2020/2021 Chevening cohort alumna; graduated from King’s College London with an MA in Education in the Arts and Cultural settings. She developed a number of art and cultural projects as a part of self-organised Ukrainian art collectives and continuously collaborated with a Ukrainian press ist publishing as an editor and translator. She’s been teaching at the Kyiv Academy of Media Arts since 2019 and at the British Council Ukraine from 2016-2019. She is currently a PhD student at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European studies. Her current research is focused on the operational strategies and aesthetic-political vocabulary developed by Ukrainian art and cultural initiatives. Together with Vlad(a) Vazheyevsky, she is a co-convenor of the Perverting the Power Vertical seminar and platform series (2022/23 iteration) at the UCL SSEES FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity. Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Daša has co-organised a number of initiatives benefiting Ukrainian fundraising and post-war reconstruction efforts such as the Records of War archive, Oberih project, and the Reconstruction of Ukraine symposium.

Alexandra Tryanova

Alexandra is an independent curator and researcher, a member of the Culture Commons Quest Office at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (Antwerp University). She graduated from the Kask Curatorial Studies course in 2022 and holds MA’s in cultural studies and law. In her work Alexandra focuses on artistic practices connected with recreation, gender, collective memory, and Eastern European avant-gardes. Recent projects and exhibitions: Just like Arcadia, Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp, Belgium (2022); Series of online-talks Conflict Zones at Jester, Genk, Belgium (2022); Velniai, Klaipeda Cultural Communication Centre, Klaipeda, Lithuania (2021). Recent publications: Passivity: Between Resignation and Pacifism (co-edited with Pascal Gielen), 2023, Valiz, Amsterdam. Previously Alexandra held the position of curator at the Museum of Odesa Modern Art and PinchukArtCentre (Kyiv). Since 2017, She runs an independent non-production residency Kunsthalle Lustdorf based on temporary independent artistic and curatorial associations for open practices and technologies in the area of the Green Valley in the suburbs of Odesa. Lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.

Supporters:

UCL SSEES FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity

Public programme events:

Artists and Curators tour. Dates TBC

AntiGonna & Alyona Tokovenko live performance in two parts. Dates TBC

Art Histories from the Ukrainian South: a talk by Alexandra Tryanova. 5 May 2023. - Book here!

Pain and its Politics: a talk by Rachel Warriner moderated by Daša Anosova. 26 May 2023 - Book here!

Images and press requests:

For press information and/or high-resolution press images contact:

daria.anosova.22@ucl.ac.uk or info@mimosahouse.co.uk