Picture It
“The artist's harbor is museum.”
— Vyacheslav Mashnytskyi
Directed, filmed, edited and mixed by Les Kasyanov.
Duration: 9 min.
Year: 2020.
The Film
In 1908, David Burliuk organised an artistic group “Hylaea.” The name is borrowed from the “History” of Herodotus, where Hylaea refers to the territory of Scythia in the mouth of Dnipro river. Olena Huro, Mykhailo Larionov, Borys Lavrenyov, Vasyl Kamenskyi, Oleksiy Kruchenykh, Benedikt Livshyts, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov gather here, in the village of Chornianka. The term “futurism” is first used by the “Hylaea” artists in 1913 in a collection published in Kakhovka.
“What is Kherson? — It’s a dacha, it’s a place. It’s an abstract concept. A city that was once built by someone somewhere. Kherson is a territory where everyone settles, and settles, and settles. Including me.”
In 2002, the artist Vyacheslav Mashnytsky returns to Kherson to found the “Soyuz Spadkoyemtsiv/02” (“Successors’ Union”) gallery right in his apartment in the city centre. In two years of productive activity, the gallery turns into the Museum of Contemporary Art of Kherson.
“Kherson won. I left everything, including my second family. I moved here, to my father's apartment. What are we going to do? — A gallery! SS/02! To let the people in, to get to know each other. Because it was very sluggish here. And I understood I would not be able to work normally in the environment of such depression. People never left Kherson. They were already melting here.”
During the occupation of Kherson by the Russian troops, Vyacheslav Mashnytsky went missing.