Alevtina Kakhidze
artist, board member of CCA and curator

It happened in Kiev that a collector wanted to change the paintings he bought for prettier ones he recently saw in an exhibition. The artist found himself in the dilemma whether he should change the paintings or not, which is illustrating the inherent contradiction of an art gallery: Is it a shop or not? I love this story as an illustration of this contradiction.
After two years having lived abroad I wouldn’t say I was driven out of the general attention of the Kiev art market because I had never really been there. I have some doubts sharing my observations on the current development in the art market in Kiev, as I am afraid to scare people. If you ask me how the landscape of curators, theorists and critics in Kiev is structured, I simply can’t detect any structure. I observe that progress in visual art still depends greatly on collectors. Artists in Kiev stick to the idea of the collector. They avoid questioning whether a work needs to be bought in order to determine its quality. They also avoid confronting that this mentality in turn increasingly prevails in the minds of the collectors.
The feelings of shame attached to creating visual arts in Ukraine compared to the economic reality of many Ukrainian or other citizens will exist until everyone possesses the luxury to produce art.
The goal of CCA or any non-profit art institution is to present art, which makes it enough to take a smell at an art piece in order to feel full. This is the fundamental difference between a non-profit art institution and a commercial space.
The mechanism for emerging artists to produce and exhibit their work in Kiev is linked to the law of supply and demand, but great artists appear independently of those demands.
I just believe the form of presentation is part of my projects; sometimes a presentation is costly, sometimes a presentation needs to cost nothing and I’d better do it cheaply. Also I do separate fundamentally whether it is my idea, which costs money or the presentation of my idea. In the first case I ask the audience to pay, in the second case I take the responsibility on myself. I try to alternate the first case with the second.

When I wrote “whether it is my idea costs money” I meant the formulation of an idea, sometimes its materialization. We also may count the time spent on it and cost for my living. I wanted to point that in this case I have not expect money from a presentation of my idea, because the audience has already paid for it and I must provide free excess to it. Tree years ago when the text was published I would love it goes like this. But in that time and now I have to alternative two cases, because the first doesn’t work always.

Published in "Post funding eastern Europe"

Broshure of the CCCK, 130 copies, 2007