+26: Am I My Generation?

“Am I a member of my generation?” – asks a character in Woody Allen’s movie “Whatever Works”. The same question is also posed by young artists in this interdisciplinary exhibition at the “Kreivės” festival. They are the post-soviet, but not yet millennial generation. In Lithuania, we would call it the Independence generation. But what name could we give it in Ukraine?

Just as the democracy in their country, these artists are also just slightly older than 26. This number is not just an age, but also a universal symbol that engenders the human experience. In Unicode, an computing language, combinations containing 26 allude to gender and sexuality: U+2640 denotes a female, U+26A3 – male homosexuality, U+26A5 – intersex, U+26A7 – transex, U+26AA – asexuality. How have such identities that “did not exist“ in soviet times succeeded in breaking the ice in such a pseudo-traditional society?

Some works in the exhibition are playful, maybe full of mockery, self-deprecation, and sometimes provocative or just ironic. Yet still, they reflect on problems that all of us as a generation and/or society face by being immigrants, not conforming with heteronormativity, or simply not accepted as our authentic selves.

Artists: Gorsad, Anton Karyuk, Yulia Krivich, Lena Siyatovska. Curators: Rasa Kavaliauskaitė, Augustas Čičelis.

The exhibition is implemented in cooperation with the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association (LIAA), with support from the Lithuanian Council of Culture and Erasmus+.