Untitled

Realized: 2015 – Ongoing

table, printer, internet interface, paper

Open Group – Yuriy Biley, Anton Varga, Pavlo Kovach, and Stanislav Turina (until 2017)

Untitled began in 2015, when there were four artists in the Open Group collective. (Stanislav Turina was involved until 2017.) The artists’ intent was to share their first reflections on the war in Ukraine and openly demonstrate their objection to Russian aggression. In January 2015, the number of victims in the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine had reached 5,358, made up of people on either side of the conflict, including civilians (according to U.N. data.) To illustrate the physicality of this statistic and underscore the subjecthood of the victims behind the numbers, the artists juxtapose the number of fatalities with the number of new people they encountered on a daily basis. The names of every new acquaintance they met were uploaded online, then immediately printed on a paper scroll alongside the ever-growing number of victims. They were planning to end the project when the number equalized. However, the collection and archiving of new acquaintances is still going strong, and will continue. Between 2014 and 2021, between 13,100 and 13,300 people, both military and civilian, were killed. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 official statistics have been unavailable, but estimates suggest that the scale of fatalities has increased dramatically. Open Group’s designation of Untitled as a project ‘in progress’ has turned into ‘unending’.

Labelling this work Untitled has an active linguistic purpose. The absence of a traditional “name” sets into relief the painful abundance of names of victims and new acquaintances, placing the focus on their presence and subjectivity without the limiting meaning of a title. As of 2015 the members of the Open Group have been living in different parts of the world, which has also changed the nature of this work, juxtaposing the ever-broadening scope of new people the artists meet independently with the constant and persistent destructive force of the war at home.

Text by – Marta Czyż 

Untitled, exhibition view "Future Generation Art Prize @ Venice 2017", 57th Venice International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2017). Photo by – Sergey Illin.  

Untitled, exhibition view "Open Group. Due to the circumstances'', galeria Аrsenal Białystok, Poland, 2017. Photo by – Maciej Zaniewski.