Artists Anna Scherbyna and Uliana Bychenkova have been selected as Dieter Ruckhaberle Award recipients of 2022. 

The statement of the jury is as follows: “Art’s potential to reveal more than the news reports: over extensive time periods, artists Anna Scherbyna and Uliana Bychenkova track politics and current events in their own respective practices as well as in collaboration with each other. Combining their keen feminist perspective with a knack for communication, they tap into complex situations and impressively convey them in artworks, curatorial projects, and participatory workshops. They do not treat the places and means of showing art and history as neutral circumstances.  An ongoing engagement with the forms and languages of museology and local historiography has formed part of their practice for many years. Their vocabulary includes harshly confrontational as well as surreally unbounded forms of staging (and intervening in) exhibitions. Drawing constantly on the possibilities of art, they not only depict realities, but their rendering transforms them in such a way that actual change becomes imaginable. Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014 marked the beginning of the ongoing war in Ukraine, which the Russian army has now extended to the entire country, Scherbyna and Bychenkova have witnessed and documented its consequences artistically and politically, in their series of works and public manifestations that emphatically raise awareness of the war’s permanence and its long-term effects”.

During their residency at Künstlerhof Frohnau in August and September 2022, Anna Scherbyna and Uliana Bychenkova will work on themes that critically engage with the ambivalent visibility that comes with refugee status: “As white female cultural workers from Ukraine, we suddenly found ourselves in a situation of positive discrimination: unlike our male colleagues and many other Ukrainian professionals of all genders, we are welcomed guests in residences and grant programs. We would like to work on a curatorial exhibition project reflecting on our (and our colleagues as well) new rational or irrational experiences of the current time. Bureaucratic, political, emotional aspects of the experience we faced resulting in uncertain awaiting, responsibility, solidarity, guilt, and rage.”