OAF toivottaa kaikille mukavaa Pride-viikkoa! Tänään esittelemme OAF:n residenssitaiteilijoiden Ton Melnykin ja Masha Ravlykin työn alla olevaa ”Our Queer Family” -ryijyä. Alta voit lukea Tonin ja Mashan kirjoituksen projektiin liittyen:
”We are working on a carpet-tapestry “Our Queer Family” because we are missing our community that was created when we lived in Kyiv. Right now due to the war and due to the Ukrainian policies toward LGBTQI+ people, many people from this community live in different cities and countries. Therefore, we have a small opportunity to meet (only shortly during some events where someone of us is invited).
For queer people, like us, queer friends are usually like a family. Also because lots of us meet homophobia, transphobia and don’t have any support in so-called blood families. Sometimes there is even no connection to our blood relatives. A carpet-tapestry is also traditionally connected with a home and family by its symbolic meaning in putting a carpet on a wall. We want to keep memories about our friends and to archive our common queer history in this way.
It is very important to tell our stories as subjects of these stories. Ukrainian queer history started to develop only in the last decades but art institutions in Ukraine aren’t interested in such projects because right now they are more concentrated on other topics, national culture and struggle. While this project is about queer people and for them everywhere. Like queer people elsewhere, we often meet a lack of representation in society. Our history disappears. Our families aren’t proud of us. First of all this project is for a small queer community from Kyiv. But also it can become an example for other queer communities around the world. It is an example of archiving, more precisely, self-archiving.
For the project we are using a group photograph taken in our studio in Kyiv, which we don’t have any more. There are 18 people from our community in the photo collage. We will add to the tapestry-portrait four more persons, who were not present at the time of taking the photograph and creating photo collage, but are dear members of the community. Society has some stereotypical image of what queer people should look like. That’s why by portraying our queer community, we also want to highlight that queers do not necessarily manifest their queerness in their appearance, but can look like any ordinary people. Our queerness is in our views and positionality rather than in appearance.
Like the medium we choose weaving because it is a meditative process that gives a space for thinking, talking and listening so we would have an opportunity to call our friends during the weaving. These conversations will become a part of the process and help our psychological well being despite the physical distance.
We have already started to weave the carpet-tapestry during our Residency program in the Outsider Art Festival in May-July 2024 in our home-studio in Helsinki. We also got financial support for production from Taike foundation. We are using the oldest way of tapestry weaving, doing it completely by hands on warps suspended on a wooden self-built frame. During the residency with the help of Taike production grant we built the frame, acquired the materials for the frame and yarn, and printed the sketch. OAF Residency grant supported us in our work: we put the vertical threads, made a warp system, created the sketch for the tapestry, and started the weaving process. But we did not get far with weaving within the framework of the residency. It is a slow process and requires much more time than a 3 months artist residency.
We are applying for a grant to find time from other engagements to continue weaving the carpet. Our estimate is that with working 4-5 hours a day, five days a week, it will take us six months to finalize the tapestry. We plan to do it from February till August 2025.
We have already agreed with the Outsider Art Festival to exhibit the tapestry during the OAF festival’s 5th edition in Helsinki in August 2025. Also we have preliminary plans with the Emma Social Center in Kaunas, Lithuania, to exhibit the tapestry there in relation to an ongoing queer archiving project of the social center. This will possibly happen in autumn 2025.”
Katso lisää kuvia projektista ja lue lisää täältä.
Lue lisää: Ton Melnyk and Masha Ravlyk Lukianova
