Ruckhaberle Award 2022: Anna Scherbyna & Uliana Bychenkova
The artists Anna Scherbyna and Uliana Bychenkova have been selected by a professional jury as this year’s recipients of the Dieter Ruckhaberle Award. The Ukrainian artists, who pursue an open artistic practice and connect their work through collaborative curatorial projects, will work together within the framework of the award. The award includes a residency at Künstlerhof Frohnau and an exhibition at GalerieETAGE at Museum Reinickendorf.
The jury stated the following in its reasoning:
When art can reveal more than the news: over an extended period of time, the artists Anna Scherbyna and Uliana Bychenkova have been following political events in their respective practices as well as in collaboration with one another. They combine a precise, feminist-informed perspective on the realities that surround them with a particular communicative ability to unpack complex situations and convey them powerfully through artworks, curatorial projects, and participatory workshops. They do not treat the sites and means of presenting art and history as neutral givens. For many years, an ongoing engagement with the forms and languages of museology and local historiography has been an integral part of their practice. Their vocabulary encompasses both sharply confrontational and surreal, boundary-expanding forms of staging and intervention in exhibitions. In this way, they consistently draw on the potential of art not merely to represent realities, but to transform them in their presentation so that change in action becomes imaginable.
Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014 marked the beginning of the ongoing war in Ukraine, which the Russian army has now extended across the entire country, Scherbyna and Bychenkova have accompanied and borne witness to its consequences in an artistically political manner, through bodies of work and public manifestations that forcefully make the permanence and long-term effects of the war visible.
During their residency at Künstlerhof Frohnau in August and September 2022, Anna Scherbyna and Uliana Bychenkova will work on themes that critically engage with the ambivalent visibility associated with refugee status:
“As white female cultural workers from Ukraine, we suddenly found ourselves in a situation of positive discrimination: unlike our male colleagues and many other Ukrainian professionals of all genders, we are welcomed guests in residences and grant programs. We would like to work on a curatorial exhibition project reflecting on our new rational or irrational experiences of the current time, both our own and those of our colleagues. Bureaucratic, political, and emotional aspects of the experiences we faced have resulted in uncertain waiting, responsibility, solidarity, guilt, and rage.”
Anna Scherbyna (born 1988, Zaporizhia, Ukraine) is an artist, illustrator, and curator who studied contemporary art in Kyiv. She is a co-founder of the Concrete Dates Collective (2015–2017) and was nominated for the Pinchuk Art Centre Prize in 2020. She works across various formats, including painting, drawing, video, and installation, addressing themes such as landscape in relation to power and war, gender performativity, and the critical revision of the socialist realist legacy. She has participated in numerous exhibitions, including A Space of One’s Own, Pinchuk Art Center, Kyiv (2017); Edenia, the City of the Future, Kharkiv (2017); Socialist Realism. Seeming to Be Another, Kyiv (2017); TEXTUS. Embroidery, Textile, Feminism, Kyiv (2017); and In a Shelter, Paris (2015). As a participant in various curatorial initiatives, she organized the exhibitions The Cave of the Golden Rose, Kyiv (2019), and Sabber, Deer and Spinning Wheel, Stanica Luhanska (2018).
Uliana Bychenkova (born 1986 in Kerch, Ukraine) is an artist, curator, book designer, and researcher. Her practice focuses on themes such as power relations and asymmetries of symbolic power, the status of decorative and applied arts, and reflections on precarity and politicized idleness. Her methods include feminist artistic research, interdisciplinary intersections, strategic imagination, and tactical inventions, formalized through a wide range of media. As a designer, she works primarily on book projects in the fields of culture and art. She has collaborated with the Visual Culture Research Center (Kyiv), Medusa Publishing (Kyiv), IST Publishing (Kharkiv), Art Arsenal (Kyiv), the Ukrainian Institute (Kyiv), the Free University of Berlin, the University of Potsdam, the Technical University of Dresden, and the European University Viadrina (Frankfurt an der Oder).
Websites: www.scherbynaanna.com and www.ulianabychenkova.com
Since 2019, the Ruckhaberle Award has been granted jointly by the Department of Art and History Reinickendorf and Künstlerhof Frohnau e.V. The award honors artists who engage with political and social issues and develop innovative forms to address them. It includes a two-month residency at Künstlerhof Frohnau, a production budget, and an exhibition in an exhibition space of the Reinickendorf district.
This year’s jury, consisting of Rike Frank (curator and managing director of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Program), Solvej Helweg Ovesen (curator and cultural scholar, Galerie Wedding – Space for Contemporary Art), Setareh Shahbazi (artist, Künstlerhof Frohnau team), Jan Verwoert (art critic, curator, and professor of art and theory at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts), and Dr. Sabine Ziegenrücker (head of the Department of Art and History Reinickendorf), unanimously nominated Anna Scherbyna and Uliana Bychenkova as the award recipients.
The awardees were selected from a pool of nominated artists. The nominators included Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, Suza Husse, Petrit Halilaj, Jörg Heiser, Judith Hopf, Antje Majewski, Josephine Pryde, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Sandra Teitge, and Raul Walch.