Sunday, January 15 17.00 EET
We invite you to the closing event of the exhibition “Decolonial Ecologies. Understanding the Postcolonial after Socialism” - a performance by Ukrainian artists Mark Tokar (double bass) and Olia Mykhailiuk (video).
Mark Tokar is an Ukrainian double bassist, composer, and improviser. He studied music in Lviv, Krakow, and at The Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice in Poland. His first album Yatoku with Yuriy Yaremchuk (Ukraine) and Klaus Kugel (Germany) was released by the Not Two label in 2006. Since 2007, he has been a member of the Ken Vandermark Resonance Project. Also, as a musician, he played in many groups and projects at various festivals in the USA, Germany, Poland, Austria, France, Italy, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and Ukraine. Mark Tokar is the first Ukrainian musician to play at the Chicago Jazz Festival. He is the leader of the Mark Tokar Quintet. Co-author of several intermedia projects, in particular, in co-authorship with Olia Mykhailiuk.
Since March`2022, Mark Tokar has been serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Olia Mihailuk lives and works in Kyiv. In 2007, she teamed up with other like-minded people and founded ArtPole Agency to unite artists working in various fields—painters, musicians, performers, and writers. She continues to develop interaction between various art disciplines, particularly performance, music, literature, and video art. In her own performances she attempts to explore the primal senses of words by referring to her own system of emotional signs and symbols. Since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022, she has been working as a volunteer in a humanitarian center in Kyiv. Since April, she has been going regularly to Irpin—near Kyiv—a city that was brutally destroyed and looted in March. Together with locals, she plants plants and flowers there and documents the stories about them.
The event is part of the international project Islands of Kinship: A Collective Manual for Sustainable and Inclusive Art Institutions, co-funded by the European Union and Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia.