Nikolay Karabinovych (born 1988, Odessa, Ukraine) lives and works between Brussels, Belgium and Kyiv, Ukraine. The artist works in a variety of media, including video, sound, text, and performance. In 2020 and 2018, he was awarded the first PinchukArtCentre Prize. From 2019, he is studying at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) in Ghent. In 2017, Karabinovych was an assistant curator of the 5th Odessa Biennale. Featured Solo Exhibitions: “Pourquoi te tiens-tu près de la porte?“, Belgium Jewish Museum, Brussels, (2022) “Vukojebina”, PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv, (2021), Archive of random rendezvous. Department of sadness. Voloshyn Gallery, Kyiv,(2020), "From Sea to Sea", Hit Gallery, Bratislava, (2019).
Karabinovych addresses convoluted social (hi)stories, particularly those from the expanses of Eastern Europe and especially those of his own extended family. In doing so, he pictures encounters which could have happened, but records of which have been systematically culled or were non-existent to begin with. Said encounters are often endured by victims of State-backed terror and propagandistic cultural and/or ethnic genocide.
Questions of spirituality, identity, belonging, exclusion, and obliged integration are variably overlapped, isolated, and posed to those in positions of power, those buried six feet under, and those who haven’t been asked before. Karabinovych asks these questions using analytical, conceptual, and/or interventionist tactics. The minutiae of topographies familiar and ‘foreign’ are crucial exhibits in the cases made.
Music plays an outsize role in the artist’s practice. Karabinovych revisits era-defining songs, genres, and luminaries, embracing their capacity to shed a sharp light on another era in another climate in another sociopolitical arena. In the process, languages link and clash. Intercultural archives form and previously censored stories are processed anew. Along the way, momentary becomes monumental and monumental becomes memory.
That which appears serendipitous is serious and acutely monitored. That which is assumed to have perished in a past Empire remains an endemic thorn in the side of the present.
Traumas and triumphs are told and untold, echoing from sea to shining sea.
www.karabinovych.com
Karabinovych addresses convoluted social (hi)stories, particularly those from the expanses of Eastern Europe and especially those of his own extended family. In doing so, he pictures encounters which could have happened, but records of which have been systematically culled or were non-existent to begin with. Said encounters are often endured by victims of State-backed terror and propagandistic cultural and/or ethnic genocide.
Questions of spirituality, identity, belonging, exclusion, and obliged integration are variably overlapped, isolated, and posed to those in positions of power, those buried six feet under, and those who haven’t been asked before. Karabinovych asks these questions using analytical, conceptual, and/or interventionist tactics. The minutiae of topographies familiar and ‘foreign’ are crucial exhibits in the cases made.
Music plays an outsize role in the artist’s practice. Karabinovych revisits era-defining songs, genres, and luminaries, embracing their capacity to shed a sharp light on another era in another climate in another sociopolitical arena. In the process, languages link and clash. Intercultural archives form and previously censored stories are processed anew. Along the way, momentary becomes monumental and monumental becomes memory.
That which appears serendipitous is serious and acutely monitored. That which is assumed to have perished in a past Empire remains an endemic thorn in the side of the present.
Traumas and triumphs are told and untold, echoing from sea to shining sea.
www.karabinovych.com
Nikolay
Karabinovych
Karabinovych
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