Archives at a time
2024, limestone, wood, OSB, wool, sound, print edition; with commissioned sound works by Hanna Bryzhata & Alexey Shmurak; 16.08-24.11.2024, curated by Natalia Revko, Odesa National Fine Arts Museum, Odesa, Ukraine
This constellation of works is grounded in the disintegrating architecture of the Odesa State Archives building in Odesa, Ukraine. Built as a choral synagogue and closed under Soviet law in 1920, it subsequently held a Jewish workers club and cinema, and was used as storage by the Romanian and NS armies during the WWII occupation and holocaust. It officially opened as the archive in 1965, after a huge four-storey concrete bookshelf structure was built inside the synagogue’s resonant open space. The exhibition responds to this building and its state of tenuous decay, and the building’s temporalities–its history, presence, and future–are its main materials. In the main hall is a series of dislocated sculptural forms, grafting para-architectural structures from the building into a new archival assemblage, a provisional set for a stage: sound artists Hanna Bryzhata and Alexey Shmurak were commissioned to compose sound works for the installation, performed within its space. Initially planned for 2020, then 2022, this iteration responds to the current context of archival frameworks and historical memory in Odesa during the war, concurrent with urgent museum renovations after shellings close by.
