News of Transcarpathia
Oleg Kharch
Residence Sorry No Rooms Available
September 26 – October 12, 2024
Room 1416, Intourist-Zakarpattia hotel
Personal exhibition of Oleg Kharch

The author’s text:
“News of Transcarpathia
A series of collage works and a room of the Zakarpatjia-Inturist hotel, which I used as a studio for the residency “Sorry No Rooms Available”, transform an existing standard-sized hotel space into an exhibition. This is an interesting experience in my practice of artistic interventions. Previously, it was Hrushevskoho Street or Maidan Nezalezhnosti, one of the premises of the River Station in Kyiv, the common corridor where I live, and finally Holosiivskyi Forest. All these artistic practices of filling with works or actions were united by the factor that they could not belong to me or at least be temporarily used by me. And my art could be destroyed or disrupted by external influence, by strangers, by an attack by armed police officers, or by a voluntaristic decision of the Station administration at any time. But now I had a completely different approach: the room that I used as an intimate and personal creative laboratory was transformed into an exhibition space at my request. Here I conducted research on the textual, visual, and cultural heritage of Transcarpathia. About two hundred postcards from the 70s and 80s, and later, which I bought at the market, reveal a whole layer of architectural and photographic local visions to my imagination. At first, I had no idea what to do with it. Then textual elements appeared, like magnets attracting postcards or their fragments, snails (and here they were appropriate because I remembered them), and also chimeras of my visual world. All that remains is to fit all this phantasmal harmony into 60*80 centimeter rectangles.
So here they are, the “Zakarpattya News”!

The SNRA residency program draws attention to the role of culture and art during the russian-Ukrainian war, aims to implement institutionally critical projects related to cultural heritage (tangible and intangible), development of artistic-cultural institutions.

The SNRA residency program, the project and the participation of Oleg Kharch were implemented thanks to grant support from The Académie des beaux-arts in Paris (French Academy of Fine Arts)
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Photo credit Mykhaylo Melnychenko

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View to the exposition

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