Ivan Svitlychnyi
Maybe We Can Have Fun Together

curated by Tatiana Kochubinska and Liera Polianskova

“My aim is not to retransmit yesterday’s news,” asserts Ivan Svitlychnyi. This statement seems radical in the current wartime context, when art is increasingly taking on the role of a “source of information”, trapped in confusing political realia. Instead, Svitlychnyi thinks of art as a field of change. For years, he has been engaging viewers in complex interactions, appealing to their consciousness and encouraging them to act.

In his new solo exhibition Maybe We Can Have Fun Together at the Arsenal Gallery, Svitlychnyi creates an environment merging different models of behaviour and options of perceiving reality based on preliminary research carried out in partnership with different scientists and researchers. At its core is the free energy principle elaborated by British neuroscientist Karl Friston, one which Svitlychnyi interprets artistically.

According to Friston, there is an organising principle for any living system. Faced with a new phenomenon, the system includes it in its worldview as a specific model. And through these formed models, it interprets subsequent experience. Once formed models begin fundamentally differing from new events in our reality, our consciousness is unable to accept the experience; the perception of such events becomes blocked. We may understand, but not experience them. Free energy is the exact delineation of disparity between reality and our perception of it. In order to recalibrate perception, we have to minimise free energy.

In his exhibition, Svitlychnyi creates an environment wherein a complex and uncomfortable situation is wrapped in common daily life events. The artist has chosen a rave as the event, decomposing it within exhibition space, the rave itself – an event culminating the exhibition – to be held on May 30th at the Arsenal Gallery power station.

The artist uses the ambivalent nature of the rave, which can be regarded as an experience of solidarity, or – conversely – as a practice of disunion. These ambivalences are embedded in the exhibition, offering a diverse experience comparable with an explosion – an event interrupting the usual order of things, while (on the contrary) normalises it, for example, in wartime conditions.

Svitlychnyi offers viewers a comfortable situation, rooted in shared human experience. Yet he chooses to steep this sense of comfort with complex unsettling topics, inviting visitors to confront the discomfort and/or uncanny within the familiar.

Ivan Svitlychnyi, a multidisciplinary artist born in 1988 in Kharkiv, Ukraine, working with new media, video, sound, and science art. He graduated from the sculptural department of the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Art in 2012. Along with artistic practice, Svitlychnyi is developing curatorial projects and architectural solutions for exhibitions in partnership with various institutions.

In 2010, Svitlychnyi founded and curated the TEC (abbreviation from thermal power plant), a creative exposition center in Kharkiv, and later curated the art organization 01011101. In 2014 together with SVITER art group (Liera Polianskova and Max Robotov), he co-founded Shukhliada, a virtual experimental exhibition space, and in 2018 Photinus, a community based educational platform for developing the art of new media in Ukraine. Since 2015, Svitlychnyi has become an active participant of the Institution of Unstable Thoughts.

In 2017 together with SVITER art group he participated in the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale reflecting on Boris Mikhailov Parliament series with the site-specific sound installation. Another collaboration with the SVITER art group resulted in the algorithmic environment Verbatix, showcased at the 2018 Vorspiel / transmediale.

Svitlychnyi was shortlisted for the Pinchuk Art Prize in 2018, 2015, and 2011. In 2018 he became the laureate of the Kazimir Malevich Art Award and in 2022 the laureate of the State of the ART(ist) within the framework of Ars Electronica Festival.

Currently residing and working in Kyiv, Svitlychnyi continues to elaborate on complex projects blending new media, video, sound, and science resonating with global audiences.