R.E.P. (Revolutionary Experimental Space)

Established  2004 in Kiev, Ukraine 

Ksenia Gnilitskaya (born in 1984 in Kiev, Ukraine), Nikita Kadan (born in 1982 in Kiev, Ukraine), Zhanna Kadyrova (born in 1981 in Brovary, Ukraine), Vladimir Kuznetsov (born in 1976 in Lutsk, Ukraine), Lada Nakonechnaya (born in 1982 in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine), Lesia Khomenko (born in 1980 in Kiev, Ukraine)

By the moment the R.E.P. group was founded in 2004, all of its members had already developed an artistic personality of their own. And they have continued in the same line ever since. However, for all these years the artists have been engaged in collective art practices, thus maintaining their small art community. The political events of the Orange Revolution proved a key element in the group's establishment. The first collective actions of the R.E.P group were effectuated in the crowd of protesters in the Kiev Maidan square: it was the unanimity of broad masses of society struggling for common political cause that brought those Ukrainian artists to work together.

Another reason to maintain the group, counting even today, is the weak infrastructure of the Kiev art scene. Short of an extensive institutional network intended to support experimental art, artists form associations substituting for nonexistent institutions. This development is typical not only of the Kiev art community but of the whole Post-Soviet space, and many other periphery countries. Having in mind a wide and diverse social background of the R.E.P. group, the artists have chosen not only to ‘practice collectivity, but also thematize it’. Since 2007 they have been involving other groups in joint projects, presenting various forms of collaboration in one space.