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Lviv Quadriennale
Scenography 2025.
The point changes space
📅 Exhibition dates: 26 September – 12 October 2025
📍 Location: Zenyk Art Gallery (third floor), 7 Shota Rustaveli Street, Lviv
The exhibition focuses on the art of scenography and aims to broaden the boundaries of its perception as much as possible. In fact, scenography today encompasses all possible manifestations of visual art in the field of stage design and even more: the visual component of the performing arts beyond the classical stage.
Our focus is on artists who work on creating theatre performances, costumes, performances and art projects that combine space with action or other media.
Openness to the new does not negate the traditional. After all, equality in diversity is a principle that lies not only in the social or political sphere on the path to democratisation and the construction of an ecological society, but is also relevant to the contemporary cultural process.
This chamber exhibition not only presents original professional artists from Ukraine, Lithuania and Austria, but also demonstrates the diversity and versatility of the art of SCENOGRAPHY itself.
THEATRICAL MODELS
Even today, artists continue to create them in the process of working on and preparing performances, despite all the possibilities offered by computer technology. Creating a theatrical model is not only about skill and certain specific technological features, it is also about fixing, the first materialisation of the artist's vision.
In the model, a fragile idea collides with the harsh reality of our material world and is tested for viability.
The exhibition features models by Serhii Rydvanetskyi, Daniila Kolot, Oleh Tatarynov, and Yulia Zaulychna — professional artists and authors of numerous productions on the stages of national and municipal theatres in Ukraine. Each of them has their own signature style and experience of working with popular and influential directors. Anna Mashkovska and Anastasia Savchenko are the youngest participants in the exhibition. The artists have already begun their professional careers and realised productions on the stages of state theatres, combining this with their studies at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture of Ukraine.
THEATRE COSTUMES
Original theatre costumes, which are an integral part of the visual design of a performance and the actor's character image, can be perceived as self-sufficient works of art.
Thanks to our partnership with the Lithuanian Theatre, Music and Cinema Museum and the support of the Lithuanian Institute of Culture, we are able to present original costumes by seven leading Lithuanian clothing and theatre costume designers, whose works are truly interesting in terms of both their imagery and design.
Sandra Straukaite, Renata Valcik, Valdemara Yasulaitite, Dovile Gudacauskaite, Neringa Kershulite, Birute Ukrainite, and Julia Skuratova work in various fields, including opera, puppet theatre, drama, performance art, and fashion design.
We can see how individual each of the artists is in her work. For example, while Sandra Straukaite's costumes are monumental and saturated with powerful energy, Renata Valchik's costume presented at the exhibition is of a completely different nature. It is a game with the subconscious and psychology, a game that is remarkable in its precision and refined simplicity.
The exhibition of works by seven authors at once gives an opportunity to form a general idea of the current characteristics and state of costume art in Lithuanian theatre.
We can see many similarities but also certain differences in the approach of Ukrainian and Lithuanian artists. But in both cases, there is a wide variety of means of expression in their arsenal, which they actively use in their work. We are talking about attention to and playing with the textures of materials, the use of various decorating techniques, and the search for non-standard design solutions in creating expressive volumes and silhouettes. But most importantly, in each case, the costume is the embodiment of the most valuable and interesting thing — the original author's idea and message.
Theatrical costumes convey a certain humour, which is usually a manifestation of individuality. And in each of the authors, this manifests itself in different ways, from the grotesque to the subtle irony.
While Lyuba Dushyna combines geometric motifs of traditional Ukrainian embroidery with the recognisable stripes of a well-known sports brand in her costumes, Renata Valchik creates the image of a faceless entity of indeterminate gender whose hair-covered face causes confusion in the viewer.
It is interesting and valuable to draw parallels with Ukrainian theatrical costumes, which helps to highlight the works of Ukrainian artists presented in the exhibition.
Yevgeniya Nagnybida's costumes and images are emphatically theatrical, featuring exaggerated forms, pronounced caricature, and provocativeness.
Asya Kozina's paper costume, created as an exhibition object or costume for a show, is interesting in the context of our exhibition not only as an example of the artist's high skill and the sophistication of her work, but also as an example of the possibility of going beyond utilitarianism, presenting a costume at the intersection of theatre, design and decorative art.
Since the curator of the project is a practising artist, the exhibition also features two costumes by Bohdan Polischuk.
INSTALLATIONS AND ART OBJECTS
The installation by Austrian artist Jürgen Münzer is based on the combination and spatial arrangement of the author's sculptural objects. This direction and approach corresponds to the general principles of SCENOGRAPHY, but distances the artist and his immediate work from interaction with the actor or performer.
At the same time, the viewer, looking at or interacting with Jürgen Münzer's objects in a different way, becomes a performer or another object of the installation. This is undoubtedly interesting.
Two Ukrainian artists from different generations and schools, representing different regions, demonstrate different approaches and methods in their work.
Liudmyla Nahorna, creating a series of art objects specifically for this exhibition, turns to costume as the main expression of her ideas and message to the audience. This work eloquently links the heritage of national culture with the current realities of war, tracing the transformation and crystallisation of identity.
Dasha Chechushkova combines video with costumes-artefacts from a performance that took place some time ago. It is a kind of echo of the performance, its emotional imprint, which, thanks to the changed context and the use of other means and tools of communication with the audience, is transformed, as if in an alchemical process, into a new, to a certain extent self-sufficient work.
Jack's puppet from the play ‘The Little Devil from the Box’ based on Ray Bradbury's story. Director Alisa Gladkova, set designer and costume designer Maria Pogrebnyak. Arlek_inn training theatre of the I. K. Karpenko-Karyi Kyiv National University of Theatre, Cinema and Television, 2024. Photo by Khristina Korol
The exhibition also features an original theatre puppet by Maria Pogrebnyak. After all, a theatre puppet can be perceived not only in the context of stage action, not only as an example of theatrical and applied art, but also as a self-sufficient interactive art object that can become not only an object for exhibition and contemplation, but also for direct interaction.
The issues that artists are working with today are diverse, but the issues of national identity, as well as the experience and processing of collective and personal trauma, are in the air.
For Ukrainian artists, as for our society, it is also important today to overcome inferiority complexes and find their own place in European or even global cultural processes.
