During the closing weekend of the summer exhibitions, the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) invites you to an artist talk by Nikolay Karabinovych. Taking place on Thursday, September 11th, at 7 PM in the CAC Reading Room, the talk will be in English. Entrance is free of charge.
The Ukrainian artist, whose video work Here and Elsewhere: Concerto for Organ, Timpani and Strings (2023) is featured in Borders are Nocturnal Animals / Sienos yra naktiniai gyvūnai, will discuss his recent trilogy and curatorial practice, focusing on themes of identity and belonging.
With works such as The Voice of the Thin Silence (2018) and Even Further (2020), Karabinovych listens to suffering rather than represents it. His practice transforms biography into a sort of historical seismograph, registering tremors from a region perpetually suspended between empires, ideologies, and genocidal patterns. Karabinovych’s sensitivity to the latent energies of place and sound – for instance, a melody broadcast across the Kazakh Steppe, or a mechanical music box echoing in a Kyiv gallery – reveals how landscapes carry spectral imprints of displacement. What does it mean to see genocide in a terrain? To hear history in a tune?
In an era of global migrations and military conflicts, Karabinovych offers resonance instead of explanation. His practice is a geography of anticipation – a quiet, radical act of imaginative resistance.
NIKOLAY KARABINOVYCH (b. 1988, Odesa, Ukraine) – works across various media such as video installation, performance, sound, and sculpture. In his artistic practice, Karabinovych addresses complex social (hi)stories, particularly those from the expanses of ‘Eastern Europe’, combining them with personal family narratives. His work, frequently engages with notions of identity, belonging and exclusion. Music plays a significant role in his practice: he revisits epochal songs, genres and personalities and uses their ability to illuminate different eras, climates or socio-political arenas.
Karabinovych was co-curator of the exhibition ‘As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories: Fragments for a Geopoetics of North Eurasia’ at HKW in Berlin in 2024.
His work has been shown extensively at public institutions including HKW, Berlin; M UHKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle; MAXXI, Rome; Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; Belgium Jewish Museum, Centre for Fine Arts Bozar, Brussels; w139, Amsterdam; Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw; and many others. In 2022, 2020 and 2018, he was awarded the first PinchukArtCentre Prize.
Karabinovych has also participated in Steirischer Herbst (2024), Kaunas Biennale (2023), the Kyiv Biennale (2023, 2021), Survival Kit (2023) and in a parallel programme of the Venice Biennale (2024, 2022).