Date & Location
August – September 2017
Odesa, Ukraine
August – September 2017
Odesa, Ukraine
Special project for the 5th Odessa Biennale of Contemporary Art. Gallery InVogue.
The exhibition «The Raft CrimeA: Trumps of Doom» was held at InVogue Gallery during the 5th Odessa Biennale of Contemporary Art as a continuation of the story about the Displaced Parliament of the Displaced.
From 16 to 19 August in Kyiv, Ukraine, among luxury restaurants and yachts, temporarily appeared the migratory Parliament of the Displaced «The Raft CrimeA» - a life raft with neon sign. On board the raft lived the Ukrainian artist Maria Kulikovska - a native Crimean, who received the status of the «displaced person» on 18 March 2014.
August 19. Friday. 10 AM. Maria Kulikovska and people that wish to join her performance started to go in the Dnipro River on the «The Raft CrimeA» that August 25 - on the Independence Day of Ukraine - to cross the invisible water borders of the EU, to get metaphorically across them, and to continue their journey on the rivers of Europe. But, at down on August 25, in Vylkove, Ukraine, the «The Raft CrimeA» was stopped by the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine. The performance ended prematurely.
Maria was living on the raft, deprived of any resources, only through support of people that care for her. The survival of the artist was dependent on compassion of other people that became the specific act through which Maria Kulikovska wanted to stress vulnerability of people that lost their homes and to appeal to the community to empathize with them. The «The Raft CrimeA» became a platform for discussion of urgent problems of immigrants and finding a way to solve them. The performance and social sculpture were made to collectively remember about the sensitivity and desperation of people that lost their own homeland and identity.
Maria Kulikovska's project in Odessa Biennale became the specific continuation of the exhibition with an identical title, which took place at the Visual Culture Research Center in Kyiv in September 2016. The floor of the InVogue Gallery was filled by gold folia and sand - a symbolic-physical symbol of the trip. The freeze-dried flowers, which were taken and gifted during the migration, seashells, mats, sculptures were also presented at the gallery space. The bright spots on this map became the reflecting jacket, yellow raincoat and the main character of Kulikovska's displacing - exhausted raft.
