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performance art program

2025

In May 2025, thesteinstudio hosted its first performance program, curated by Valeriia Buradzhyieva.

The program included nine performances representing a wide range of performative practices — from body-oriented performances (Stanislav Turina, Natalia Lisova, Rita Lira, Danylo Zubkov, Anna Shevchenko) to hybrid formats such as extended cinema (Max Svitlo and Salt Salome), relational art (Variable Name), and theatrical reading (Valeria Shiller and Zhenya Stepanenko). The performances were accompanied by an educational program, including a lecture by Larisa Venediktova on how to watch performance, a workshop by Yaryna Shumska on how to create one, and a public podcast recording with theatre director Illia Razumeiko.

This marked thesteinstudio’s first comprehensive attempt to explore how a space primarily dedicated to visual art can become a medium for performative practices. The relationship between performer and viewer took on different forms, with boundaries blurring not only formally but also contextually — raising the question of what kind of space performance inhabits. Here, the performative unfolded at the intersection of institutional openness and the intimacy of a studio hidden in a residential courtyard, which at times also became a stage. The program examined how both the studio and its surrounding environment shift under the influence of the performative gesture, and how the gesture itself becomes embedded in the architecture, atmosphere, and social contexts of the place.

The project was implemented with the support of the Ukrainian-Danish Youth House.

01 Rita Lira

The Trap
Mai 2025

A performance-installation exploring the feeling of being trapped by one’s own mind, by space, or by life circumstances. The work examines states of stagnation, limitation, and the search for an exit, inviting audiences to reflect on mechanisms of liberation and transformation.

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02 Yevheniia Stepanenko and Valeriia Shiller

Canceled Love

Mai 2025

A staged reading of an erotic novella set within the world of contemporary art, exploring artistic ambition, power, desire, and complex human relationships. Through irony, exaggeration, and recognizable figures from the art scene, the artists investigate romantic and professional dynamics, the limits of freedom, and mechanisms of emotional influence. The work combines satire, melodrama, and fiction, addressing themes of love, competition, and violence within cultural environments.

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03 Anna Shevchenko

Empty Form

A performance-research project examining the relationship between form, meaning, and human relationships. Through working with words, objects, and space, the artist approaches performance as a site of potentiality, where meanings continuously shift depending on context and interaction. The work reflects on emptiness, presence, and the ways meaning emerges through encounters between objects, people, and environments.

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04 Nataliia Lisova

Moment

A performative act dedicated to exploring time as a continuous flow of events and transformations. Through movement and the interaction of natural elements and space, the work focuses on moments of change, when familiar perceptions of reality dissolve and create possibilities for new experiences. The performance investigates the relationship between time, the body, and the surrounding environment.

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05 Stanislav Turina

Here — There

A performance that investigates the very possibility of presence and communication between performer and audience. Through a minimalist structure and the rejection of traditional narrative, the work asks what makes a performance become an event and how the experience of sharing the same space and time is formed.

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06 Maks Svitlo and Salt Salome

Signs for Those Born on Earth: The Horse, the Nomad, and the Chronic Apocalypse

A hybrid event situated between exhibition, performance, and urban walk. The project explores experiences of nomadism, the search for home, and life within a prolonged state of crisis, engaging with themes of collective trauma, memory, and a chronic sense of apocalypse. The work combines personal narratives, spatial experience, and performative drift.

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07 Danylo Zubkov

Dance with a Drone

A performance exploring relationships between humans and technology within the context of contemporary Ukrainian reality. The work approaches the drone as both an instrument of war, an everyday companion, and a new participant in human experience, raising questions about proximity, distance, and coexistence with technological agents.

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07 Maryna Marynichenko and Lera Karpan

Variable Name

A total relational installation addressing the unequal distribution of resources within the art field, social capital, and institutional proximity. The project brings together works by artists who are often separated by grant applications, residency opportunities, and competition for technical resources. The space of thesteinstudio becomes a temporary map of professional connections and chance encounters, where people who have worked alongside one another for years may finally occupy the same field of visibility.

The installation was inspired by a real situation from the artists’ professional experience: during preparations for a large cultural festival, projectors and extension cables would mysteriously disappear from the spaces of lesser-known artists and “accidentally” reappear in the installations of more established participants.

The title refers to the concept of a variable in programming: its value may change, while the variable itself remains. Similarly, the artists continuously shift between roles as artists, curators, researchers, and coordinators. The project engages with themes of memory, participation, local histories, and multisensory practices.

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