We are pleased to announce an interesting event in our scansen - the project of the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts "HAPPINESS IN THE QUADRAT". Exhibition of paintings "FORMULA OF HAPPINESS".
29 May, Thursday
13.00 hrs.
Exhibition hall of the Transcarpathian Museum of Folk Architecture and Life, 33a Kapitulna St.
The HAPPINESS IN THE QUADRAT exhibition project, launched in spring 2020, was a creative response to the COVID-19 pandemic that has paralysed lives around the world. Throughout the year, this action was a kind of art therapy for creative young people cut off from the usual channels of communication. The artists were invited to visualise their sense of happiness in the face of global disaster on a 1 square metre canvas, which gave the project its title. Thirty-four authors, graduates of the Department of Monumental Painting at the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, who were scattered around the world, created almost 40 metres of happiness. Grouped into four blocks, these works illustrate certain modes of contemplation and visualisation of images of happiness, reflecting its ontological nature in different phases of development: from expectation ("Inspiration"), contemplation ("Weightlessness"), receiving ("Acquisition") to transformation ("Transgression"). This project united individual visions of happiness into a collective phenomenon, and became an artistic study of its psychological, emotional and social nature. It reveals to the viewer a certain mechanism for overcoming the crisis and encourages them to search for their own formula for happiness.
When this project was created, we could not imagine the challenges that every Ukrainian would face in less than two years. It was on 24 February 2022, when Russia's treacherous aggression and war cancelled the quarantine on the same day, that what seemed difficult to overcome at the time became a thing of the past. In the ruins of the current war, along with cities and numerous victims, several of our "squares" of happiness were destroyed. They remained only in electronic and printed formats as a testament to our fate and history. But their voices, along with others, embody the theme of happiness forever, as the only source of light and life, the quality and meaning of human existence. And now - as the main motive of resistance and hope of our entire country.
During 2023-2025, the exhibition project travelled across eastern Ukraine and was shown at exhibition venues, public spaces and museums in Kharkiv, Nizhyn, Hlukhiv, Dnipro and Okhtyrka. The exhibition at the Transcarpathian Museum of Folk Architecture and Life connects the two geographical poles of Ukraine - Kharkiv and Uzhhorod - with a symbolic link. It transmits the impulse of hope and the power of artistic resistance across the country, affirming the only path to freedom and happiness for all Ukrainians.
Project video: https://youtu.be/daEUqUaNdwk
Project promo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N5wabnO2R8
Yevhen Kotlyar
project curator, professor,
Head of the Department of MFA of KhSAIA
PROJECT TEAM:
Yevhen Kotliar, author and curator of the project
Valerii Halchenko, Polina Fil, project designers
Mikhail OPALEV, Seriy Klimanov, animation of works
Tatiana Kasyanenko, project coordinator
Daryna Metelnytska, Lada Kasyanenko, literary editors
Oksana Blagina, English translator
Ginevra House, English translation editor
The project involved students, graduates and teachers of the departments of monumental painting, multimedia design, audiovisual art and graphic design.
The project was carried out with the financial support of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation and with the assistance of Oleksandr SOBOLEV, rector of the KhSAIA and head of the Eastern Regional Scientific and Artistic Centre of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine.