The exhibition “Gardens of Dreams” is open in the M17 CAC!

On 25 July 2024, the new exhibition project Gardens of Dreams opened at the M17 Contemporary Art Center. The exhibition features the artworks by renowned international and Ukrainian artists.

The artists of the project: 

Cao Fei is an ultra-contemporary artist ranked among the Top 5 in China, and her popularity is constantly growing. The 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 became a notable event in the artist’s career. Cao Fei’s works have been exhibited in many global cultural institutions, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and MoMA PS1 in New York. In Oz, Cao Fei has imagined a powerful new avatar: poised, androgynous and likewise water-related with her bionic tentacles, Oz emits a serene aura through the multiplicity of worlds and the infinity of time;

Refik Anadol is an internationally renowned media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of machine intelligence, winner of numerous awards and prizes. Anadol’s site-specific audio/visual performances have been featured at iconic landmarks, museums and festivals worldwide, such as the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, MoMA (New York), the Centre Pompidou, Pinakothek der Moderne, Art Basel. And now, for the first time in Ukraine, Anadol’s work will be presented at the M17 Contemporary Art Center. In Machine Hallucinations: Hubble Dreams-A, Anadol addresses the question of whether machines can dream. Images captured and recorded by the Hubble telescope, provided the artist with a vast dataset to train a generative adversarial network, to visualize the dreams of machines, creating ethereal landscapes;

Aljoscha. His works are represented in a number of museum collections across the world, such as Tate Modern in London and Museum Ludwig in Cologne, among others. Recently, his artworks his works were showcased at TEFAF art fairs in New York and Maastricht. The Paradise Engineering offers transcendental immersion in the artist’s translucent and delicately coloured synthetic organic forms, inviting the audience to reflect on the phylogenetic origins of human eudaimonia and upcoming bioethics. The artist seeks to elevate humanity, trapped in the harsh uncertainties of the genetic lottery, to a state of deviative progress through the ongoing pursuit of paradise engineering;

Anatoly Gankevich. His professional artistic career began back in the 1990s and, in no time, he became one of the most prominent representatives of the New Ukrainian Wave. As the artist, he is famous for creating paintings in a unique technique – imitation of mosaics, and video art. Last year, Gankevich’s solo exhibition Night in Paradise was on view at the Frédérick Mouraux Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium. The “Night in Paradise” was inspired by a single photograph he took in the garden outside his studio at night, when the cosmic depth of the trees of fall, transforming into pixelated galaxies of the universe unfolded right before him. The contemplation gave birth to the image of the heavenly cosmic garden of the universe, where all the stars are born and die, and revealed that only miracles make sense;

Megumi Ohata was a runner-up for the Batsford Prize 2019 and delivered an artist talk “Reimagining Human Body” at the Tate Modern (London) in 2023. Ohata’s artwork Mujina & Haori explores Posthuman philosophy, the future beyond the bravest expectations, as well as gender, and identity. Ohata perceive their art as an extension of the body, blurring boundaries beyond skin, seeking the non-human form within;

Wolfgang Stiller has been an artist for almost 40 years, during which time he witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the prime of popular culture. His works can be found in prestigious museum collections around the world, from China to Germany. His realistic Matchstick Men sculptures with tips which resemble life-sized, charred human heads, address ideas of death, mortality, and the sense of depersonalization and exhaustion associated with burnout. Stiller though leaves their meaning open-ended, allowing the viewer free reign to form their own interpretation; 

Anna Myronova has recently been appointed a corresponding member of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine. She is a lecturer at the Department of Design, Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University. As early as 2016, the artist was included in the Forbes ranking of the most successful representatives of contemporary Ukrainian art. For the Gardens of Dreams exhibition project, Anna Myronova created new works of art Where the Silence is Born, that reflect metaphysical landscapes and unexplored horizons.

The Gardens of Dreams exhibition project explores the imaginary worlds of artists: from human coexistence with artificial intelligence, expanding the horizons of synthetic biology through bioism, the birth of their own models in virtual and real worlds to the Garden of Eden, as a metaphor for the temple of the future, which is being built today and is not solely constructed by humans. 

Learn more about the project here.

The exhibition is supported by Art Support Fund and Adamovskiy Foundation.

Welcome to the exhibition! 

Address: 102-104 V. Antonovycha St., Kyiv, Ukraine

Tuesday-Sunday from 11 am to 8 pm

Admission fees:

Full ticket price = 100 UAH

Concessions = 70 UAH

Tickets can be purchased at the M17 CAC.