I do not feel free to do what I want

Start of the exhibition: Friday, December 11, 2020, 14:00 to 19:00
Duration: extended until 6.3.2021

Participating artists:
Vagrich Bakhchanyan • Veronika Eberhart • Olia Fedorova
Julia Gaisbacher • Vitya Glushchenko • Christoph Grill
Michael Heindl • Maksym Khodak • Anna Manankina • Alina Sokolova studio ASYNCHROME • Helene Thümmel • Anton Tkachenko
Bernhard Wolf • Gamlet Zinkovsky • Anna Zvyagintseva

Curated by:
Nastia Khlestova, Tatyana Tumasyan / Municipal Gallery, Kharkiv Margarethe Makovec & Anton Lederer / < rotor >, Graz

Pictures from the Exhibition

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The slogan Cultural Friendship refers to < rotor >’s long-term, bilateral cooperation with art institutions in other cities. The cooperation with the Municipal Gallery in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv started in 2019.

Reciprocal curatorial research at the beginning was followed by a guest artist programme in Graz and Kharkiv and then an exhibition in the ARTbasement of the Municipal Gallery in October 2019. In terms of content, this exhibition in Ukraine already dealt with questions about the interpretation of individual freedom. Due to the all-dominant events of this year, this subject has become more topical and many things appear in a different light.

“Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else” is a common definition of the limits of individual freedom to be found in this wording in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of the French National Assembly of 1789. To define “which injures no one else” is not an easy task in a time of pandemic. By way of illustration, a restrictive measure may benefit the physical health of some, but at the same time harm the mental health of others.

Assuming that there was a social fabric which, on the scale of a state, was constituted to grant the individual maximum individual freedom, which concepts, or if you like, which values would have meaning in this social constellation to describe the freedom of the individual?

This sentence has been taken from the statement of the four-member curatorial team, which was formulated in autumn 2019. Its aim was to query the experiences of artists from countries with a system history as different as Ukraine and Austria, translated into works of art. And this is still one of the motives for understanding the compilation of works of art shown at < rotor >. The freedom that artists insist on exerting when realising their works is another motif that must be emphasised. This can be the freedom to do something that is not provided for in the system, to take action that tests the limits of the system. But it can also be the freedom to do something you don’t want to be deprived of by any means, to insist on something, and this action is worth creating a work of art in order to capture a certain “image” based on it.

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Exhibition: 12.12.2020 – 27.2.2021
Opening hours: MO – FR 10:00 – 18:00, SA 12:00 – 16:00
Wednesdays until 19:30
Closed on Sundays and holidays
Guided group tours upon reservation:
rotor@mur.at, 0316/ 688306

Free entry!

The exhibition can be visited in compliance to the most current COVID-19 regulations.

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The exchange with the Municipal Gallery Kharkiv was, aside of the continuous supporters of < rotor >s year programme, made possible by:
BMKÖS / European and International Cultural Policy
Austrian Cultural Forum Kyiv
Kulturvermittlung Steiermark
Ukrainian Institute, Kiev

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