Conversations at AIL – Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab
November 13, 2025, 6 pm

Ehemalige Postsparkasse, Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Wien

AIL together with the Office Ukraine, will host an evening of conversations with curators, artists, and researchers from Ukraine, reflecting on exhibition making amidst war, ways of practicing with at-risk institutional archives, and the role of the artist as a witness.

The program will feature a curatorial introduction to the exhibition projects from the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture (DCCC) and Asortymentna Kymnata, Ivano-Frankivsk. 

Everything for Everybody, 6 pm 

Conversation with the Curators of the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture

The first part of the evening addresses the theme of heritage under threat, the precariousness of archives, and the ways in which artistic practice can resist destruction while fostering new forms of collective memory.

Curators Kateryna Rusetska, Victoria Donovan, and Natasha Chychasova, together with colleagues from the Pokrovsk Historical Museum, Tetiana Kostiuchenko and Anhelina Rozhkova, will discuss the research foundations of the exhibition “Everything for Everybody”, developed for the Kyiv Biennale 2025 in collaboration with the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture (DCCC). 

The exhibition framework consists of archival sources from the Franki Raffles Photography Collection at the University of St Andrews, and the photographic archive of Mykola Bilokon, preserved by the Pokrovsk Historical Museum. Raffles’s *Soviet Women* series documents labor and gender across the late Soviet Union in 1989, while Bilokon’s photographs portray everyday life in Pokrovsk during the collapse of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s early independence.

In 2024, Pokrovsk was destroyed by Russian bombs, forcing the evacuation of the museum’s collections. The exhibition traces this story of fragility and displacement, bringing Bilokon’s archive into dialogue with Raffles’s images to reflect on how we document and remember places that are endangered or erased entirely.

Do Toads Sing in the Walls? 7.30 pm 

Conversation with Olga Poliak and Alona Karavai, curators of Asortymentna Kymnata, Ivano-Frankivsk

The second conversation turns to “Do Toads Sing in the Walls?”, a project developed by Asortymentna Kymnata in Ivano-Frankivsk, which established a dialogue between artists serving on the frontline and those remaining in civilian contexts.

Curators Olga Poliak and Alona Karavai will present the project through photographic documentation of exhibitions first realized in February 2025, alongside close readings of selected works from the exhibition they brought to Vienna from Ivano-Frankivsk.

Guest speaker Klementyna Kvindt, drone operator, poet, and ornithologist, will join via Zoom to share her reflections on displacement, resistance, and service in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. 

The title comes from the song Evening of Toads by Stanislav Krul and colleagues, written with the help of AI.

Live Sound Performance by Anton Lapov, 9 pm

The evening will end with a live sound performance by Anton Lapov, a Ukrainian media artist, computer musician, and curator. Lapov is the coordinator of the media-art collective Art Cluster R+N+D and founder of the digital record label BOCTOK.

The program is initiated by Office Ukraine Vienna / tranzit.at in collaboration with the Kyiv Biennial and Asortymentna Kimnata, with support from ERSTE Foundation. 

It will continue on the evening of November 14 at mumok kino with a special screening program curated by the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture and Asortymentna Kimnata.

The Kyiv Biennial, which celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2025, is an international project that interweaves artistic, political, and social issues. At the initiative of tranzit​.at, the Lentos Kunstmuseum presents the exhibition Vertical Horizon, conceived specifically for Linz, on view from 12 November, together with the collaborative exhibition Hollow Earth at Kunstraum Memphis. At the same time, further projects are taking place at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, M HKA in Antwerp, the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture, and the Dovzhenko Centre in Kyiv.

Asortymentna Kimnata is both an independent art space in Ivano-Frankivsk and a scalable model for supportive, decentralized formats of contemporary art on the so-called “periphery.” Through a practice of radical decentralization, Asortymentna Kimnata facilitates exhibitions, residencies, educational initiatives, and music events, creating a vital infrastructure for contemporary artistic practice beyond urban and institutional centers.