Curators: Anton Tkachenko, Nastya Khlestova.
Artists and artists: Vlas Belov, Tamara Turlyun, Oleksiy Yalovega, Olena Dumasheva and Marginal act, Anton Malinovsky and Vitalia Shchelkanova.
On March 11, 2020, the “Target Audience” exhibition in collaboration with Garage 127 opened at the JUMP Contemporary Art Center.
The exhibition “Target Audience” is a record of the activities of Garage 127 in Kharkiv.
Garage 127 is a space for cultural initiatives by artists and for artists. Artist Anton Tkachenko and curator Nastya Khlestova opened a space for exhibitions, meetings and discussions in the garage in the summer of 2019. The main goal and mission of Garage 127 is to create a community that is comfortable for work and interaction. The work of Garage 127 is focused on various formats of knowledge exchange and the development of new tools for understanding the present and the changes of the future. Garage strives for a world of horizontal connections and the absence of borders.
In “Target Audience”, the curators focused on the Garage 127 community as the most important component of the functioning of the space. Garage 127 is positioned as an artist-run space and a self-organized initiative. Everything that the Garage does is the initiative and responsibility of the organizers. These two concepts – initiative and responsibility – are key in defining internal freedom, and they determine the entire activity of the Garage – what we do (initiative) and for whom (responsibility to the community).
“Target Audience” combines projects that directly or indirectly raise the issue of internal freedom: from institutionality in Vlas Belov’s, from materiality in Oleksiy Yalovega’s, freedom and non-freedom of choice in the game “Bridge or Park”.
The curators consider all the artists whose works were included in the exhibition to be part of their community and co-participants in the creation of the Garage’s history. For example, Tamara Turlyun showed Tiger victim as part of the “First Exhibition” project at Garage 127 in the summer of 2020, and Vitalya Shchelkanova and Anton Malinovsky’s video “Connection Check” was not only shown for the first time at the Garage, but was also created in this space.
All these concepts: freedom, responsibility, diversity and careful attitude to history are the basis for determining the target audience of Garage 127.
For Garage 127, it is important to work not only with artists, but also to interact with artistic initiatives in Ukraine. The curators of the Garage believe that the community of art spaces should develop by supporting each other. The exhibition, which tells about Garage 127 in Poltava, in the center of contemporary art Jump, is part of such cooperation, which supports horizontal connections between our cities, spaces and, above all, people interested in the development of the art scene in Ukraine.