On 13 and 14 December, the Odesa National Fine Arts Museum will present two performances created within the Antonin Artaud Fellowship. The works explore life in Budzhak and the return of the landscapes of the Sea of Azov.
On 13 December, from 11:00 to 19:00, Odesa Fine Arts Museum will host a performance by Heorhiy Gogatadze titled My Friend From Nowhereland. It is dedicated to the correspondence between two boys — one from Budzhak (in the South of Odesa Region) and one from Balochistan (a historical region on the northern coast of the Indian Ocean, formerly an independent country and now a territory divided between three states).
“My friend Sayyaf and I met online and recognised a mirror in one another: different cultures, but shared feelings. Our landscapes are two ‘borderlands’. The merging of our voices and memories creates Nowhereland — an imagined shared space between two realities,” says Heorhiy Gogatadze.
In this performance, the artist explores the common ground between two parallel experiences: life on the periphery, the search for identity in a religious context, and isolation where the internet becomes the only channel of communication. It is a participatory work that shifts and transforms through audience involvement.
On 14 December at 17:00, ONFAM will present the performance Sea Battle by Oleksiy Min’ko and Volodymyr Prylutskyy. The lives of these two artists are closely tied to Berdyansk, which is currently under occupation. In Odesa, on the Black Sea coast, they occasionally glimpse a mirage of their home city on the Sea of Azov. Through photography, play, and conversation, Min’ko and Prylutskyy will attempt to draw nearer to the city concealed in the fog of war, recreate its contradictory context, and step into the mirage.
United by a shared theme of the South, both performances speak about closeness at a distance, mirages as a means of survival, and imagined spaces that emerge when real territories become inaccessible.
The ONFAM screenings form part of a wider series of performances by Antonin Artaud Fellows exploring Ukraine’s South. Other presentations will also take place in Pervomaisk and Zaporizhzhya.
About the Antonin Artaud Fellowship:
- The Fellowship was established in 2022 to support Ukrainian artists who continued their creative work in Ukraine despite Russia’s full-scale invasion.
- It was founded by proto produkciia and the contemporary opera laboratory Opera aperta.
- The Fellowship is named after Antonin Artaud — French writer, playwright, theatre reformer, actor, poet, and essayist.
- It supports early-career artists and arts managers working in performative and theatre arts in Ukraine, with a particular focus on independent practitioners, creating space for experimentation and innovation.
- The Fellowship is funded by international foundations. The series of screenings on Ukraine’s South is supported by the International Renaissance Foundation.