MAPS. Exhibition of the works of Ukrainian artists. 4 April – 24 April.The exhibition presents the works of three artists from Ukraine. It is an intergenerational display, combining different artistic personalities and techniques. Besides the paintings and collages by Nikita Tsoy, who was honoured with the title of the Best Artist of Ukraine in the 2017 Art Battle competition, we present the drawings of Vasyl Savchenko, holder of the Gaude Polonia scholarship of the Polish Minister of Culture, as well as the sculptures of Oleg Kapustyak, award-winning artist and teacher from Lviv, with a track record of more than sixty individual and joint exhibitions.Professor Rafał Wiśniewski, director of the National Centre for Culture, emphasises that the institution he runs has acted for the facilitation of dialogue between the Polish culture and the cultures of Central and Eastern European countries for years by popularising their heritage and supporting creators, some of whom have been guests of NCC’s cyclical events: the Eufonie International Festival of Central and Eastern European Music and the East of Culture Festival, as well as scholarship holders of the Gaude Polonia Scholarship Programme of the Minister of Culture, administered by the NCC. Artists from Ukraine have always had a special place in this group. The exhibition, which is at the same time an expression of solidarity with the Ukrainian people, is already the second – after the outdoor exhibition of Maria Prymachenko’s works – art display organised after Russia attacked Ukraine, aimed at familiarising the Polish audience with the culture of our neighbours.What the artists whose works will be displayed at Kordegarda for three weeks – from 4 to 24 April – have in common is subtlety, lyricism, and melancholy. They refer to collective subconsciousness and archetypes. They move around the world of dreams, in which the title “maps” constitute a kind of intellectual puzzle. In the works of Oleg Kapustyak, whose geometric sculptures are a three-dimensional transposition of building layouts – hospitals, factories, and cities, we find unsettling, oneiric forms. A viewer expecting a reproduction of a map would be much mistaken. They are more like block structures resembling modernist destructs, ruins of civilisation, which fill us with unease. They intrigue the viewer and inspire them to search for content and meaning hidden behind the massive walls. They give rise to doubt and questions to which there are no certain answers. The artist refers to two aesthetic categories – sublimity and picturesqueness. The former originates from the fear of the unknown, the eternal, subject to the ravages of time, while the latter evokes a nostalgic and decadent mood.Among the maps, we unexpectedly encounter a man – a casual, everyday self-portrait. On polished stone, in a fragile balance, a face with empty eye sockets was placed. The subtlety and frailty of this sculpture contrasts with the massive blocks. It emanates love for beautiful matter, for body shapes, and at the same time a meaningful lack of corporeality, which contributes to a feeling of terror. The lack of eyeballs has a double meaning. It is at the same time an internal vision and a privileged act of perception, a way of showing infinity in a finite, closed lump of bronze. It causes a feeling of confusion and a sense of cosmic emptiness in the viewer.Certain unsettling post-humanism can be perceived in the works of artists from Ukraine. In 1926, Jerzy Sosnkowski’s futuristic novel entitled Szalona katedra [Crazy Cathedral] was published. In the book, the author talks about the new man, devoid of fundamental generic features – emotions. He presents a vision of Amsterdam, where a cholera epidemic is spreading like wildfire. The people – numb, resigned to inevitable death – live in this behemoth of a city, part of which has been captured by machines, forming something like a superorganism, perfectly self-regulating, monstrous.In the city, a cathedral is being built, which loses the features of a building, loses the sacred dimension, only to become a disturbing, para-organic structure in itself.They have already reached the fifteenth floor – the cathedral was becoming more and more slender. But there on top – no – it was not the scaffolding – definitely not. It was reinforced concrete structures – yet really strange! As though a lot of ribs were spreading around the lofty bell tower. These ribs were growing out of the mass of the building, the body of the tower, twisting and winding up […] bizarre in their form, thinner, thicker, zigzagging, interlocking […]. The wall lives, it lives like a human. The wall has its soul, its heart, its face. The wall has its body. And so it also has nerves. The cathedral resembles the Babel tower. It is being erected by pride and vanity. It is becoming a superorganism that will take over the city and the world. In order to stop its construction, another architect resorts to a ruse. He threatens to damage the foundations during the construction of the underground.We find a similar superorganism in Vasyl Savchenko’s monumental work. “Humankind is losing the notion of man, devaluing it, dissolving it in a world full of unease, fiction, global information overload, conflicts, and cataclysms,” the artist says. Man is replaced by tissues. Tendons and muscles form an abstract map of a human body, specifically the chest. An black square abyss can be seen where the heart should be. Transhumanism, propagated – among others – by the controversial figure of Yuval Noah Harari, says that we are one of the last generations of homo sapiens. We are already able to print out tissues, and we will soon start to construct bodies and brains and create consciousness. Transhumanism will simply be yet another step on the path of evolution.Nikita Tsoy creates a symbolic map of signs and ideograms, where we find references to both the archetype and the icons of popular culture. The web of associations is very subtle. Tsoy mythologises everyday items, searches for underlying, magical meanings, sometimes resulting from linguistic nuances, just like in the case of a car wing. He creates a world of objects – relics, or maybe holy relics of the era of man, which seem to take on apotropaic functions, they are like sacred objects – contemporary icons painted on wooden boards. Not everything is easy to recognise. There are many structures only evoking certain associations though a shape or drawing. There are cyber-formula puzzles, intricate ornaments printed on pseudo-brains. They are both biological and digital. They resemble maps of integrated circuits, leading the viewer through a gloomy, surreal world with no people can be found. Or maybe they are just ill?Vasyl Savchenko (born in 1994)An interdisciplinary artist, he works professionally in a number of fields of visual arts and design. He took part in more than 80 international exhibitions and artistic projects in different countries (Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Portugal, Italy, Germany, France, Bulgaria, Spain, the United States, China, Thailand, and Egypt). Assistant at the Digital Techniques studio at the Faculty of Graphic Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk.Scholarship holder of the 2019 Gaude Polonia Scholarship Programme of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, with a residency in Gdańsk.Winner of the main prize in the Best Layout and Typesetting category at the Ukrainian Young Book Design Awards 2019 for the book My Curriculum Vitae.Coordinator of the Graphics Department in the “Entry Complete” exhibition project presented at Zbrojownia Sztuki (Armoury of Art) at the Great Armoury in Gdansk.Oleg Kapustyak (born in 1962)Born in Lviv; sculptor, conservator, teacher; he works in metal, stone, and wood. Participant of more than 60 exhibitions. His works are part of institutional and private collections in countries such as Austria, France, and Germany.Nikita Tsoy (born in 1991)Graduate of the National Academy of Visual Arts and Architecture at the Wall Painting and Sacred Culture Studio, he received his diploma in 2016. In the years 2018-2019, he studied at the Kyiv Academy of Media Arts. In 2017, he was awarded the title of Best Artist in Ukraine in the “Art Battle” competition of the White World gallery in Kyiv. Since 2016, he has been a member of the National Association of Young Artists of Ukraine.Katarzyna Haber, curator of the exhibitionOpening: 6.00 p.m. on April 5Duration: April 5, 2022 – April 24, 2022Curator: Katarzyna Haber, National Center for CultureOrganizers: National Center for Culture, Ministry of Culture and National HeritagePartner: Pragaleria