The Ukrainian Institute of Contemporary Art (UIMA) hosted a series of public events dedicated to exploring the urban environment, abstraction, and everyday visual practices. The events took place within the framework of two exhibitions of the Eastern Gallery – “After Line”, Before Form” and “Sights, Seen, and Never Seen” – and combined a curatorial tour, an art walk through the district and public discussions.
This was reported by Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art.
One of the events was “Scenes of the Neighborhood: An Art Walking Tour” – a curatorial art walk through the Ukrainian Village district in Chicago. The event began with a viewing of the exhibition at UIMA, after which the participants were presented with the concept of the program. During a walk through the streets of the district, visitors were invited to record the surrounding space through photography, sketches or texts, using their own cameras, phones or sketchbooks. The focus was on buildings, infrastructure, plants and other elements of the urban environment that usually remain unnoticed in everyday traffic.
After completing the route, the participants returned to the institute, where a discussion of their impressions and a presentation of the created works took place. Visitors shared what exactly caught their attention, what details of the urban landscape they noticed for the first time, and how they managed to “bring to light” previously invisible elements. Following the event, the curators planned to collect photos, texts, and drawings into an online mini-exhibition for publication on digital platforms and social networks.
The art walk was conceptually connected to the exhibition “Sights, Seen, and Never Seen,” which explores images of urban life that are often ignored or remain hidden. The project focuses on everyday objects and details of the urban environment, reinterpreting them as carriers of memory and endurance. The exhibition is inspired by the resilience of Ukrainian artists in times of upheaval and shows how fragments of history and everyday life are transformed into objects of memory.
On the same day, a curatorial tour of the exhibition “After Line, Before Form” was held at UIMA, open to the public. The exhibition focuses on the transitional moment when the point becomes a line, and the line becomes a form, exploring the liminal spaces between them. The exhibition features works by artists from Ukraine, the Ukrainian diaspora, and the international community. Through painting, graphics, and sculpture, the artists explore geometry as both a physical structure and an imaginary order, where the interplay of line and form creates depth, rhythm, and meaning. Abstraction emerges as an intuitive dialogue between imagination and reality.
Both exhibitions and related events were prepared by students of the Curatorial Practicum Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The course is led by UIMA Curator Adrienne Kochman, a faculty member in the SAIC Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism. The exhibits also include works from the UIMA permanent collection.
Photo: Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art
Author: Danylo Pievchev