Exhibition
I’m Not Here To Be Stronger Than You
3 May 2023 – 1 Jun 2023
Regular hours
- Wednesday
- 12:00 – 18:00
- Thursday
- 12:00 – 18:00
- Friday
- 12:00 – 18:00
- Saturday
- 12:00 – 18:00
Free admission
Address
- 47 Theobalds Rd
- London
- London
England - WC1X 8SP
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- There are lots of bus routes with stops between 3-5 minutes from our new venue. 59, 68, 91, 168, 188, N91, X68
- The nearest tube and train stations are: Holborn (3 minutes), Russell Square (6 minutes), Chancery Lane and Covent Garden (7minutes).
- The nearest mainline station are: Farringdon Rail and KingsCross ThamesLink.
The first major presentation of works by Ukrainian artists Alyona Tokovenko and AntiGonna in the UK.
About
In the exhibition, autobiographical narratives are manifested through the acts of (auto)eroticism, transgression and pornographic imagery incorporating painting, sculpture, installation, video, and viscerally embodied live art. Hurt and injured bodies are presented in the gallery space through moving images and morphing canvases. Pain as visual language, and a key theme of the artists’ works, addresses the politics of the current moment.
Alyona Tokovenko and AntiGonna are bright representatives of a new generation of Ukrainian women artists working with transgressive practices, radical intimacy, and personal traumatic memories. The artistic thinking of both artists develops through the media of live and fine art, keeping them deeply interconnected and letting painting become a part of their performative action. Taking up autobiographical fragments from their personal histories, Tokovenko and AntiGonna delve into a dialogue on their methods of breaking oppressive power streams. The title of the exhibition quotes Belgian poet and artist of Ukrainian origin Sophie Podolski from her major oeuvre ‘Le pays où tout est permis’ (1972). Radically denying hierarchies, this phrase resonates deeply with the whirlpool of identitarian cliches the artists’ and curator’s explored during the ongoing war in Ukraine and their immigrant statuses, proposing a poetic response to current challenges of hierarchical power, displacement, limits of strength, instant demand for competition and self-explanation.
The exhibition gathers together the most recent large-scale acrylic paintings by Alyona Tokovenko, made during the artist’s residencies since Alyona’s displacement to Europe in April 2022. At the heart of the show is a body of moving image works produced by AntiGonna in Kyiv, while also in exile, reflecting her traumatic witnessing of the horrors of war. Highlights include AntiGonna’s and Alyona Tokovenko’s collaborative performance piece presented at the Mimosa House space during the first weekend of the show, as well as the public programme running in parallel under the auspices of the Perverting the Power Vertical event platform based at the UCL FRINGE Centre for Cultural Complexity.
The exhibition is curated by Daša Anosova and Alexandra Tryanova - Ukrainian researchers of Ukrainian art and culture and recent immigrants to the EU and the UK. They consider the show being a collaborative project of all four participants.
Presented at Mimosa House, the exhibition and the public programme are supported by the University College London FRINGE Centre for Cultural Complexity.