The Local Museum of Paradise Project is a joint exhibition of three well-known Ukrainian artists – Oleg Tistol, Mykola Matsenko and Roman Minin. “Modern art is a logistics of senses,” – the authors say and immediately invite the spectators to the game of senses, starting with the title of the project.
“The art of the past and modern art, either consciously or subconsciously, revolves around heaven. It doesn’t matter whether it is connected with the inability of finding it or with the irony. Most painters have been looking for heaven and creating artificial heaven or talking about heaven and hell since ancient times”.
Local Museum of Paradise
According to project participants, characteristics of local heaven lie in the fact that our country has united completely different, independent and free people, “Such people can be united by one single strategy. This is the strategy of fighting between the good and the evil, which supposes leaving hell and going to heaven.”
Another aspect and the option of reading the title refer to the administrative and territorial unit which in this case serves as a cultural unit. The artists think that alongside with the transformations in our country which start with community initiatives, the formation of the museum should be started “from below”. To achieve this, the artists offer to create museums in every region, where the citizens will be able to interpret the categories of heaven or aesthetics on the whole.
This idea of the artists was greatly influenced by the venue of the exhibition. It is Pechersk and one of the most resonant new buildings in the country at 9A, Str.Grushevskyi, which are good places for discussions. The authors offer their own view of the notion “museum” as a dynamic and open social structure, a space for public expression and active discussions of the problems of culture, ethics, and aesthetics, local and global problems.
“The theme of the museum is a painful subject for the Ukrainian cultural space. That is why we don’t offer the European model of the museum which is based on archeology – the collection of the best works, their preservation and popularization. What we offer is more like the museum of ideas – our own version of heaven.”
By showing the example of effective cooperation, the artists open the discussion in order to provoke criticism, discussion and finding the ways of development. “Art and cultural process are the subjects of discussion. The “Heaven Museum” gives the chance of becoming an actual project which could grow into a regional, state or the world “Local Museum of Paradise”.
