Before the Future - exhibition at Gallery VI PER

Curators: Iryna Miroshnykova, Oleksii Petrov, Borys Filonenko

With this exhibition, we want to present the results of the work of five temporary, newly formed collectives that brought together more than fifty participants to create joint statements within the framework of the Ukrainian National Pavilion's program at this year's 18th Venice Biennale of Architecture.
Ukraine has been fighting against Russian aggression for the ninth year, the second year under full-scale war conditions. The Biennale takes place at a time when the residents of Ukraine are most doubtful about their private and professional strategies. It is also a time for reevaluating the role of architects and their actions during the war, while simultaneously being a period of transformation in the relationship to space due to war experiences and the realities of regular terrorist attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. Yet, this is also happening at a moment when it is most necessary for us to express ourselves in international dialogue and to speak for ourselves.
As appointed curators of the Ukrainian pavilion, we decided to create a project with an open script: instead of realizing a monophonic expression with selected authors, we proposed a form of alternative curatorial work and shared participation with various actors in the fields of architecture, art, and science. If curator Lesley Lokko wrote in the introduction to the main exhibition The Laboratory of the Future about imagination as a tool for building the future, we decided to envision the process of creating the pavilion, which would give us the opportunity to ask questions, conduct multiple conversations both in Ukraine and within the international platform, or to collect and narrate stories, thereby better understanding each other.
We began by sending letters, subsequently holding joint online meetings with a group of fifty participants and asked everyone present to expand this circle by sending out their own invitations – first on their own behalf, then in the name of the five temporary collectives that had split from the larger group. The proposal of this participation mechanism became the basis of the project Before the Future. As curators, we engaged in dialogues with newly formed temporary collectives to present their statements in the Ukrainian pavilion. By addressing matters that were partially complementary and partially critical, we imposed no other limitations on the collectives than those inherent to the capacities of the overarching project. We wanted the resulting exhibitions to correspond to the principles of collective expression, which was the foundation of this interaction.
After nearly half a year of hard work, we combined interdisciplinary research, artworks, and architectural models into a collective exhibition. We are presenting it for the first time right here at the VI PER Gallery.