A small town of Kaniv, towering above the right bank of the Dnipro river, is usually associated with Taras Shevchenko, who is buried on the Chernecha mountain here, according to his testament.
But the art life in Kaniv does not revolve solely in Shevchenko’s shadow. Previously, students and professors at the Kyiv Art Institute (currently—the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture) used to come here for plein airs. The glorified Dnipro and its cliffs were inspiring, they filled with new ideas, and remained in the artists’ memories.
Such place could not fail to form an artistic community around it. The creative movement was embraced by the ChervoneChorne artistic association—the initiative that grew from a private art collection and turned into the whole ecosystem, which supports modern Ukrainian artists and helps them create. Since 2011, the annual Kaniv International Sculpture Symposium has been held here, hosting world-class sculptors who live and work in the city for three weeks.
That’s how Kaniv turned into the town of modern sculpture. But even an invincible stone is affected by war.
A gallery on Dnipro cliffs
Yurii Stashkiv, a 54-year-ol businessman and collector, believes that everyone can plant a garden. If everyone did that, our world would be a different place.
Yurii also believes that “a stone is the first one to enter the garden.”
“When everything is already settled, then we can build houses. But we should not mess with the landscape. A man should live in a garden. When you build something—you should pay your respects to the environment. You can’t build to prove your big ego.”
Having made his career in international logistics, Yurii is certain that the greatest human fear is arrogance. Throughout his whole life, he has been searching for ways to make his brain generate new neural connections so that not to become too self-confident in his views and not to be a hostage to his own false judgments.
These searches brought him to two places—Kaniv and Tibet. The former, due to its nature (the calm Dnipro river, quiet streams, lush greenery), relaxes the overloaded nervous system in just a few days. The latter, with its highlands and lack of oxygen, forces your body to think only about survival, and thus to rethink all previous experiences.
However, besides nature, there is still another source of new knowledge and experience, which is art. From an amateur collector of paintings, sculptures, and antiques, Yurii has grown to become a cultural manager who brings artists together and creates a space for them to create new things. Surely, in Kaniv (as Tibet is too far).
An artistic refuge
The artistic association ChervoneChorne has nothing to do with love or sorrow, or with Stendhal’s classic novel. This is a part of the story of the non-interference policy. When Yurii came to Kaniv for the first time, he realized he wanted to have his own refuge here. He bought land here—a hotel in the Austrian style, that had already had seven owners before him (Yurii himself would never build houses higher than one floor, so as not to tower over the landscape). In Soviet times, there was a tourist center called Kanev there, where workers from Soviet Russia came on vouchers.
Yurii understood he wanted to create a modern cultural centre in place of the Soviet tourist center. Next to the hotel, there stood an abandoned canteen building of the same tourist center. It was nicknamed “red black” by the people because of the colors of the walls.
“The gallery will be here,”—Yurii thought then. And he made it happen.
He didn’t want to build anything new. Instead, he designed a garden next to the hotel, completely immersing in the process, studying the laws of coexistence between plants, soil, water, and the sun. The garden was a success, with gazebos, a playground, and hedge arches. Since then, Yurii organized annual summer camps for children—his own as well as those of his colleagues. Their daily schedule was planned to the minute: hiking and sports, English and drawing, clay and plasticine.
Such camps (actually, symposia) were later organized for the adults, too—for professional sculptors, but they already had Volyn granite instead of plasticine. The sculptors carved it into the artworks that now adorn the Kaniv garden and the Dnipro coast or are exhibited in Lviv’s Stryi Park and the center of Irpin, and travel to Ukrainian and international exhibitions while their authors are fighting, volunteering, and becoming disillusioned with their craft because of the reality of war.
“When the dam bursts, everything will be flooded here,” Yurii says, looking out from the gallery veranda on the first floor at the quiet Dnipro River.
The world he has created around him, the world which grew out of the philosophy of “creating without interfering,” cannot accommodate the absurd cruelty of war. Any minute his garden and the hotel with its sculptures can all go underwater.
But they are still standing.
Cut off the excess
Vitalii Protosienia, a sculptor and painter, is one of those whose sculptures appeared among Kaniv cliffs. And then he had to leave his workshop and join the army. Today, he operates drones in the Bakhmut sector as a part of the Fifth Assault Brigade. He was lightly wounded when an enemy FPV fell nearby and cut him with debris.
At the beginning of the full-scale war the military enlistment offices closed their doors in front of Vitalii: they said he was useless due to the lack of experience. In winter 2023, he was called up.
“At first it was complicated. The army is a completely different world, schedule, circle of friends. The war is not like anything. But strange as it may seem, there is everything here that is common in civilian life—routine, everyday life. People can adapt to everything, it’s just a matter of habit and time,” he says.
Like many others, the sculptor was severely disappointed in his craft with the beginning of the full-scale war. He found another use for his hands and started welding Czech hedgehogs. However, after some time he returned to the idea that culture is always important, and art can’t be paused.
New ideas don’t come to Vitalii as easily as they used to—the war exhausted him. Still, he claims he would love to return to his workshop and create something, if he only had time and space for that. He loves the feeling that creativity gives him—the exchange of energy, calmness.
“People rush somewhere. There is too much energy in the modern world, trying to engulf them. I would like to help people get rid of unnecessary things and meanings. To concentrate on important things in our life and nature. To focus on life itself. It can be much simpler—not so complicated with social processes that people created artificially. This is what war is like,” Vitalii explains.
At the symposiums, this space—without any artificiality, with only the most important things—existed. The artist recalls that the main thing the sculptors had there, in calm Kaniv, was not even the work process itself, but the communication with “their folks,” people of the same state of mind.
He misses that.
The only thing Vitaliy can focus on now is the war.
“Any means other than the physical destruction of the enemy make no sense,” he says, cutting off all the unnecessary. As if from stone.
Sculptures should be touched
In order to assemble his art collection, Yurii, who is not directly related to any of the artistic crafts, gradually developed his experience and obsessions.
“First there are, as they say, works of the first taste—you buy what you like. Then you start to travel a lot. You realize that everything you have bought doesn’t charge you emotionally anymore. So, you keep searching. Just like with stone—you cut off the excess. You don’t hoard. You concentrate on two or three artists. And then you search for the talents together. You have three perspectives—scientific, practical, and subjective. The decision made by three people is much more valuable.”
Yurii Stashkiv searched for the talents together with an artist Oleksandr Diachenko, whose creative work he greatly admired. He offered Oleksandr to organize the Kaniv International Sculpture Symposium. The artist agreed, so as soon as in 2011, four sculptors from Ukraine and another one from Germany came to Kaniv. And in 2013, the number of foreign and Ukrainian participants increased. During the last ten years, Diachenko has been a co-curator of the Kaniv symposiums.
Yurii provided the artists with housing, stone and possibility to create with a view on the green hills and the Dnipro river. The artists left him their sculptures that they had carved here.
It was here that allegedly the most famous sculpture in the park was created: “Confident” by Vasyl Korchovyi. “Confident,” a 3-meter-high figure of a naked woman, had been standing quietly on the grass near the gallery in Kaniv for two years until it arrived in Lviv, where it became part of the Sculpture Route during the Lviv Sculpture Week curated by Pavlo Hudimov. The work by Vasyl Korchovyi, who had often come to Kaniv to work, became probably the most discussed artwork in Lviv. Waves of hate filled social media, vandals poured oil on it and tried to set it on fire. The sculptor repeatedly said he had created a woman just as she was. There is something about non-interference here, too.
The Japanese sculptor Yoshio Yagi worked in Kaniv—his “Meditation place for Monk” now stands in Irpin.
It is not usual to see all the artworks on the Kaniv hills. They travel no less than their creators, if not more: to exhibitions, galleries, and parks. Now some sculptures are located in Lviv, one artwork stands in Irpin, and another part stays in Kaniv. They stand in rows in Yurii’s garden, where locals often come to rest with their children, or for a wedding photo shoot. But Yurii claims it should not be like that—stone needs space.
“Imagine a golf field. These sculptures would stand on hills with a hundred meters between them. So that nothing distracts an observer,” Yurii explains.
He also believes a sculpture should be touched—only then will you be able to understand it.
“A sculpture is created for hands,” he assures.
Here, in the garden, there are works by the Italian artist Alessio Ronaldi—two abstract bodies fight for space, hard and soft.
“He conveyed all the suffering of the bodies that the Italians depicted through the suffering of the material. Modern Italy reconsiders now all those classis forms,” Yurii explains.
Here, “Dedication” by the American Cuban artist Thomas Oliva features a man drowning on his raft. Dedicated to all the emigrants who, fleeing the regime, get lost on their boats in the middle of the ocean.
Yurii’s favorite one is “Wind” by Oleksandr Diachenko. A stone that is being carved by the elements.
“It needs to be properly placed around a plant to feel the movement. As though the wind carved it,” the man explains.
A stone, the wind, and a delicate human hand are simple things that do not reveal the human ego. A tiny island, where one can hide from oneself, remains in Kaniv.
Translation — Olha Dubnevych
§§§
[The translation of this publication was compiled with the support of the European Union and the International Renaissance Foundation within the framework “European Renaissance of Ukraine” project. Its content is the exclusive responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union and the International Renaissance Foundation]
