Open Group (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga)
Repeat After Me
Repeat after me by Open Group includes installation, video, and karaoke components, which together comprise a manual of sorts for identifying the sounds of enemy weapons used in war. Several weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Ukraine’s State Emergency Service distributed a manual for citizens that details how to react in areas where military actions occur. The order and type of response depend on whether the attack is conducted via assault rifle fire, artillery shelling, multiple rocket launcher shelling, or even aerial bombardment. Very often, the only way to distinguish the type of fire is to determine the type of weapon by sound. The video’s participants are displaced Ukrainian civilians temporarily residing in a refugee camp in Lviv, who share their memories and expertise in the sounds of war. By reproducing the sounds of various types of weapons, they conduct a kind of instructional karaoke. The transmission of these simple sound sequences, while unable to convey their lived experiences, indicate the price of this knowledge. A knowledge which is the new reality for the Ukrainian citizens–possessing it helps them to survive. Viewers can then repeat these sounds into a microphone placed in front of the video, illuminated by a red spotlight. This microphone plays the role of a portal, acquainting the viewer with the physical experiences of the video participants, and at the same time, a barrier that denotes a certain theatricality and the impossibility of grasping a lived experience of war.
Open Group was founded in 2012 in Lviv by six Ukrainian artists. The group’s structure has changed over the years, and its present members are: Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga. They occasionally invite other artists or others to take part in their projects and join the Open Group, thus exploring the concept of collective work, interaction, and communication between people, artists, situations, and spaces. Since 2011, the group members have been running independent art spaces, such as the Detenpyla Gallery and the Efremova26 Gallery in Lviv, Ukraine.