Natalia Revko (UA)

Natalia Revko is an independent curator and contemporary art researcher. She is focusing on the underground conceptual art practices of the 1980s and the origin of the first contemporary art institutions and curation approaches in independent Ukraine in the 1990s. This area of interest arose from her experiences working as an archivist at the Museum of Odesa Modern Art. For now, she continues the research independently, collecting oral stories and digitizing artists’ archives.

As a curator and head of the NGO Slushni Rechi, she is primarily collaborating with emerging artists, and organizing educational projects and exhibitions. One of them is a sound laboratory in the Botanical Garden in Odesa, where artists, biologists and philosophers together investigated the space and history of the garden and artistic strategies for working with plants. Currently, she is co-curating the artistic research lab on war experience Land to Return, Land to Care, inviting artists to reflect upon changes in their lives, which are happening along with the changes in the environment.

After the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Natalia started her emergency residency in the contemporary art center Laznia (Gdańsk, Poland), where during the first months she curated the exhibition I can talk only about war / I can talk not only about war, as well as collaborated with residency curators in organizing a project Extended Workshop aiming to support Ukrainian artists in Gdansk.

In 2022 Natalia collaborated with Kandis Friesen in the exhibition Her Left Year is Shorter than Her Right, which took place in Galerie im Turm (Berlin, Germany). Through the lens of 1980s conceptual practices in Odesa, Natalia explored the city’s specific topography, focusing on the coastline as a place of doubling and mirroring.

During her residency in KAIR, Natalia is planning to continue her research on how city maps, walking tactics and trajectories influence the artistic practice, investigating the art landscape of Košice.

This residency is supported by the Creative Europe programme. The residency program is supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council. Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of the project.
The residency is organized in collaboration with Meet Factory in the Czech Republic, hablarenarte: in Spain and Visual Culture Research Center, in Ukraine.