GRANTEE
During the March-April 2022, after the start of the large-scale Russian invasion, all the museum artifacts of Khanenko National Art Gallery in Kyiv were taken to the bomb shelters. Empty walls began to tell their stories to museum workers and rare visitors. Since July 2022, the museum team has been working with contemporary artists to rejuvenate the museum space, conducting various cooperation projects with visual artists and musicians.
Working together with the artists of “Opera Aperta,” a laboratory for contemporary opera in Kyiv, Ukrainian composers Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko created a five hour operatic performance for thirteen museum rooms, dedicated to the history of museum. The opera was premiered on 1 October, just ten days before a large missile strike on Kyiv, during which one of the ballistic rocket shit the park area in front of the museum and damaged the historical building.
The creation process of the opera involved a series of acoustic experiments in museum spaces. A performative exploration of galleries and rooms was combined with the historical research of museum artifacts and the building itself Appreciation of the museum as a home and institution, as well as consideration of museum transformations during wartime, became an inspirational departure point for operatic performance.