R.E.P. Group

general tumult to stage interventions and actions that they retrospectively called the “Carnival.” It was a moment that saw a young generation emerge from the agony of the Soviet past and Ukrainian provincialism. Media outlets all over the world were reporting on the civil unrest in Ukraine for the first time, with easier access to the Internet lending these events a truly global reach.

Following the revolutionary aesthetic activism of their inception, R.E.P. began posing more general questions on social topics. The group developed models for artistic collaboration in a Ukrainian art world characterized by a lack of institutions. They initially shifted their space of representation to the street. In their very first action “Fast Art,” staged in Crimea, they painted “Minute Pictures” that referred to 20th-century art history and sold them at a street kiosk for the price of a hamburger. In “Forced Enlightenment,” R.E.P. invited passersby into a darkened minibus to take an introductory crash course in contemporary art—an experience that left some of the participants nauseous. The restructuring of the Center of Contemporary Art (which succeeded the Soros Center) then provided R.E.P. with a year-long opportunity to use its studios in 2005. This laboratory situation gave rise to projects and social dynamics: the CCA proceeded to become a gathering place for the local scene and a hub for the exchange of ideas and information, offering space for collective and individual exhibitions as well as, quite simply, space to unwind. R.E.P. was conscious of the institutional privilege that its ability to use this space represented and hence opened it to up the local arts scene, fully in keeping with the name they’d chosen for it: Revolutionary Experimental Space. Political campaigns and the new, aggressive world of advertising offered patterns for further artistic activities including their series of “Interventions.” R.E.P.’s spontaneity left virtually no oxygen available for internal conflicts, and they went about their doings in an anti-hierarchical and consensual manner—ever skeptical of the simplified rhetoric of the Orange Revolution and the post-revolutionary years. R.E.P. embodied an exceptional model of communication and interaction that was almost without parallel in the post-Soviet world. And when their collective revolutionary impetus ultimately fragmented into various aesthetic practices, with the group losing its unifying agenda, individual and international artistic careers arose as a result. H.S.