"So, will the Sun ever shine again?" is a poetic invitation into an absurd world that revolves around a woman's body that has long been shaped and colonized by powers far beyond. The rhetorical question directs to a "mantra" expressing a hopeless objection to this hysterical world's social and political burdens of the body. The "mantra" is the unrhythmic fusion of a woman's desire to taste inner freedom and both her physical and emotional response to foreign uninvited intrusion towards her so-called most "sacred" space - her body. So, where does your freedom end? And where do we go from here, when the sun shines again?

In her Mantra Valentina Maz is dealing within the inner conflict - not feeling comfortable in her own skin. “I want you to see me. I want to stay invisible” - repeating the artist. This confusing paradox was born in the concervative environment, in the paranoiac culture, where the female body is squeezed between shame and guilt.
Healing Mantra rethinks boundaries that society puts on the body and overcomes the existing double standards, simultaneously calming and purifying your body and mind.
Together with Valentina Maz, we invite you to go deep and liberate yourself from the pressure of the concervative mode, leave behind the identity burden and find the way to commonality without feeling yourself unappreciated. 

Daria Prydybailo
Author of the concept, Curator

Healing Mantra to Unchain Yourself and Become Visible / Artist Valentina Maz

WHAT MASKS HAVE YOU WORE IN YOUR FAMILY? by Laura Arena

WHAT MASKS DO YOU WEAR TO BE SEEN? by Laura Arena

DO YOU HAVE INTENTION IN CHOOSING THE MASKS YOU WEAR? by Laura Arena

"The Secret Garden" (2019) — sound project by Ukrainian composer and sound artist Alexey Shmurak on the borders of ambient, contemporary classical and lo-fi independent music. The project is built on home recordings of Alexey Shmurak's songs (2013-2017). These songs are extremely fragile, vulnerable, nostalgic, with great sentiment for the classical music. Shmurak's voice singing these songs is non-professional, and piano accompaniment performance is quiet, inactive. This approach refers to great Ukrainian composer Valentyn Sylvestrov (b. 1937) and other artists from "new simplicity" and "new romantism". In "The Secret Garden" the songs are is edited and mashed up with samples from different music and field recordings to create the feeling of an unconscious, sleepy experience, with unexpected switches and meaningless repetitions. For all the strangeness of the character, the music is non-aggressive, soft, and at a comfortable volume for calm listening. The key idea of the project is the gardens of the memory — with nostalgia, deconstruction, lack of connection and surrealism.

Alexey Shmurak was born in 1986. He is a composer and sound artist based in Kyiv, Ukraine. After training as a pianist and graduating from the National Music Academy of Ukraine in music composition, Alexey started exploring various fields and practices: classical, contemporary classical and experimental music composition and performance. Shmurak's music explores genre borders, nostalgia, deconstruction, attention gaps and interruptions. As a performer, he frequently employs voice, drums, winds, electronics and surrounding space. As an educator, he makes lectures, workshops, lessons and essays in the fields of critical listening, political and social aspects of music, borders of disciplines and discourses.

Alexey had numerous performances and multimedia projects at Akademie der Künste Berlin, WDR hall Köln, International Summer Courses for New Music Darmstadt, Muffatwerk Munich, Warsaw Philharmonic, Gogolfest Kyiv, Lviv Philharmonic.

THE SECRET GARDEN by Alexey Shmurak

ART MATTERS UKRAINE is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting artists and integrating Ukrainian contemporary art into the international art scene, and vice versa. The institution is devoted to today's critical, experimental, thought-provoking contemporary art and projects within a scholarly framework revising the art history. 

We work on multi- and cross disciplinary projects that involve experts from different fields (archeology, history, sociology, filmmaking, etc) and countries, crossing borders that exist on every level.
https://artmattersukraine.org

ART MATTERS UKRAINE

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