Nomadic Museum of Ukrainian Architecture
Alex Bykov
Dmytro Prutkin
I am an architect exploring the legacy of Ukrainian architecture. My main research methods are photographing, preserving and systematising rare archive materials and conducting interviews with authors and participants of the projects. One of the main representative approaches that I use in my work are exhibition projects. I exhibit and curate my own art and research projects, as well as projects of other architects and artists. Among the most important of them is a series devoted to Soviet modernism in Ukraine, which began in 2015 with an exhibition «Superstructure». Another field of my work are publication projects. I am co-author of the books «Soviet Modernism, Brutalism, Postmodernism. Buildings and Structures in Ukraine 1955-1991» in collaboration with Eugenia Gubkina (Osnovy Publishing and DOM Publishers, 2019) and «Orthodox Chic» in collaboration with Oleksandr Burlaka and Sasha Kurmaz (Osnovy Publishing, 2020). I also curated and edited “5.6” magazine issue «Architecture. Community. Time» (Viktor Marushchenko School of Photography, 2018) dedicated to the topic of uncontrolled urban development in Ukraine. This days I am an assistant lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture (Brno University of Technology), where I led my atelier and course on architectural photography. Among my last projects were participating as co-curator at the exhibition “Retrotopia” in Berlin (2022-2023) and at the Ukrainian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2023.
The very image of a museum is subconsciously established as a building. Then it turns out that a “museum of architecture” is nothing more than a building for buildings. But what if the “museum of architecture” can be not a solid form notion? What if it's movable in continual flux and exploration? What if it’s a “nomadic museum” travelling around and searching for new knowledge, while sharing its own?
The nomadic motif, apart from a conceptual one, can also be forced such as the necessity for rescue during disasters of different forms and scales. In the face of the permanent evacuation of all valuables in Ukraine after the war started on 24 February 2022, nomadism became a new form of existence both for people and institutions. As the most social, eternal, and solid form of heritage, architecture is also the most vulnerable and fragile during the war. Equally endangered but “movable” are architectural archives and artefacts, which have and may become in the future the only testimony of architectural monuments that are lost in history.
This project aims to develop a research performance in which the concept of “nomadic museum” on the example of Ukrainian architectural heritage can demonstrate potential to respond both to the current challenges of architecture and museology. The objective is to conceptualise the idea of a museum, which goes beyond the walls, crosses national frontiers and expands the international environment. The project “Nomadic Museum of Ukrainian Architecture” will establish a relationship between territory, heritage and society.