OPEN GROUP (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga)

Repeat After Me II and Untitled 

Curated by Marta Czyż
Organized in collaboration with Magda Sawon of Postmasters Gallery
601Artspace, 88 Eldridge Street
May 9 - June 22, 2025

601Artspace is excited to announce a special presentation of two projects from the Ukrainian collective OPEN GROUP. Please join us on Thursday, May 8th from 6-8pm for the opening reception. 

Special Events:
On Friday, May 9th at 6pm, curator Marta Czyż and Magda Sawon will lead a public walkthrough of the exhibtion. 

On May 10th at 4pm, join us for a conversation with Open Group, curator Marta Czyż, and Mark Lilla, essayist and professor at Columbia University. 

The backstory: David Howe, founder of 601Artspace, saw Repeat After Me II at the Polish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2024 and immediately wanted to bring it to New York. He invited longtime friend Magda Sawon, a co-founder of Postmasters Gallery, to partner with 601 to produce what has become the first multi-installation exhibition of OPEN GROUP in the U.S..

Repeat After Me II (2022, 2024) features two films playing in a space that the artists describe as a "military karaoke bar of the future." In each film, survivors imitate the sounds of the war in Ukraine, from gunfire and drones to ambulances and sirens. Microphones are set up to allow viewers to repeat those sounds if they wish. The 2022 work features "internal refugees"—those who escaped west from embattled eastern regions of Ukraine—sharing their visceral experience of the war in real time. In the 2024 work, the format is the same but the witnesses are Ukrainians now living in exile abroad, in other European cities as well as New York, reliving the sounds they recall. Together they present the grim continuity of the ongoing conflict. In the purported entertainment context of karaoke, the sounds become a form of communication between the witnesses of war and the public. Boris from Mariupol, one of the protagonists of the 2022 film, delivers a direct message which becomes a theme of the entire work: "Repeat after me, so you hear and never forget."

Untitled, which began in 2015, aims to visualize the number of fatalities of the war in Ukraine as a continuous—perhaps endless—scroll, never to be completed. To express the grim scale and physicality of this data, the members of Open Group have continuously noted their encounters with new acquaintances, positioning their names in contrast to the numbers of those deceased. At the center of the gallery sits a printer on a gigantic table, printing new names onto a continuous paper scroll, along with numbers of those killed in the war as they are confirmed. As the artists meet new people during the exhibition, their names will be added to the data. Thus far the names of the living always fall behind the numbers of the dead.

601Artspace will be showing Repeat After Me II in a temporary space on the 3rd floor of 88 Eldridge Street that we have specially adapted for this project. Untitled will be exhibited in our ground floor gallery.

Biography:

Open Group (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga) is a Ukrainian collective founded in 2012 in Lviv. Since 2015, it has been scattered across different countries, with members living in Ukraine, Poland, Germany and the United States. They have held solo exhibitions at institutions including Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland (2025); Serlachius, Mänttä, Finland (2025); Kulturdrogerie, Wien, Austria (2023); HB Station, Guangzhou, Сhina (2023); Labirynt gallery, Lublin, Poland (2022); Аrsenal gallery, Białystok, Poland (2017); PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv, Ukraine (2014); Closer art centre, Kyiv, Ukraine (2013).

 Their works were featured at the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale 2015. In 2016, Open Group curated the show entitled “Dependence Degree, Collective Practices of Young Ukrainian Artists 2000-2016” BWA Awangarda (Wrocław, Poland). In 2017, the group’s work was presented in frames of the Future Generation Art Prize@Venice 2017 (collateral events of the 57th Venice Biennale). In 2019, the Open Group was the curator of the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 58th La Biennale di Venezia. In 2024, Open Group represented Poland at the 60th Venice Biennale with the project "Repeat After Me II". The artists’ works are in the collections of the KADIST, Paris (France) and San Francisco (USA); Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (Poland); ARS AEVI, the Museum of contemporary art in Sarajevo; MOCA NGO/ Ukrainian Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA) collection, Kyiv (Ukraine); National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv; Museum of Contemporary Art in Kherson (Ukraine) and in private collections.

This project is supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

                         

Image: Repeat after Me II, Open Group (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga), installation view, Polish Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2024, curator — Marta Czyż,  photo by Jacopo Salvi / Zacheta archive