Night Disco

 

under the ‘Night Movement’
Kyiv Biennial 2015 ‘The School of Kyiv’, The School of the Lonesome (Kyiv, Ukraine)

2015

Co-curated with Aleksei Borisionok

Organisation Committee: Varvara Gevorgizova, Anastasia Ryabova, Lesia Kulchynska, Ksenia Malykh, Timur Basha, Natasha Serikova
 
 
The overproduction of information makes curating one of the most important cultural logics. One chooses and curates everything. Constant delegation of authority is a never-ending process of choice. In our case, in the framework of the Kyiv Biennial, this delegation looks the following: a curator of the Biennial ---> a curator of the school ---> an artist-curator ---> an invited curator. The School of Kyiv is often being described as non-hierarchical and horizontal, but how does this network, with its junctions and wholes, distribute power?
As an opposite to the serious intentions of the curators, we have decided to turn to such a hedonistic and relaxed event as a discotheque. Who dances during the war?
The space of a nightclub is often described as liminal and utopian, where bodies are moving in one rhythm, embraced by empathy and shared experience. 
At the same time, a disco is a space for power, it is a dictatorship of the playlist, face control, dress code, forcing one to have pleasure.  We are interested in exploring a connection between pleasure and frustration, rest and work, a social utopia and duties.
We aim to project the organisation scheme of the Biennial on the party itself by giving all Biennial participants and afterwards everyone else an opportunity to shape a common space of the discotheque. When the playlist, which represents a structure of responsibility and subjection, is over, everyone gets an opportunity to play songs from youtube