Future in the Past: An Artist Talk with Nikolay Karabinovych
Join us in person at MoCA Arlington for an artist talk with contemporary Ukrainian artist Nikolay Karabinovych. Karabinovych’s video work Something Happened This Spring is currently on view at MoCA Arlington through May 14, 2023 as part of Global Spotlight: Video Art from Ukraine.
A somber and elegiac single-channel video, Something Happened This Spring addresses the violent clashes that took place in Odesa on May 2, 2014, and the concurrent fire in Odesa’s Soviet-era Trades Union building. In the face of confusion, uncertainty, and the lack of a credible investigation, the day’s events became fodder for conspiracy theories and Russian propaganda, while official silence encouraged public amnesia about what had happened. In the meantime, the building itself stood, frozen in time, as a physical reminder of the events of that day. Karabinovych’s video attempts to breakthrough what art historian Alex Fisher has called this “monument of silence.”
Karabinovych will discuss the work and his practice more broadly. The event will begin with a screening of the work and takes place in person at Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington.
Nikolay Karabinovych
b. 1988, Odesa, Ukraine
Lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium and Kyiv, Ukraine
Nikolay Karabinovych (b. 1988, Odesa, Ukraine) works across various media such as video installation, performance, sound, and sculpture. He explores the social histories of Eastern Europe, approaching collective and personal memory by means of analytical, conceptual or interventionist tactics.
In 2020 he graduated from the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) in Ghent. Karabinovych was an assistant curator of the 5th Odesa Biennale. In 2022, 2020 and 2018, he was awarded the first PinchukArtCentre Prize.
His work has been shown extensively at public institutions (M UHKA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; Belgium Jewish Museum, Bozar, Brussels; w139, Amsterdam; Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw; Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv; and many others) and in galleries (Hunt Kastner gallery, Prague; Voloshyn Gallery, Kyiv; Hit Gallery, Bratislava and others)
