2022/2023, installation, online activity, light, six-channel sound, website
Ivan Svitlychnyi’s work combines an interactive installation with online activity. Donate modifies the artwork-viewer relationship, shifting the latter’s position. Now an emitter/giver rather than recipient/taker, the spectator can provide the art object with a source of energy, keeping it alive. This is how Svitlychnyi makes his audience an active party to the process of preserving the object in a specific condition; notably, direct interaction between the emitter/giver and the object may never take place.
Donate alludes to war as a humanitarian and ecological disaster, to the direct environmental impact of military action, and to long-term outcomes of aforementioned developments in peacetime, local and global alike. The artist emphasises the need to develop a strategy for the future, pointing to the nature of crises and conflicts as extending beyond the local, and to the universal dimension of caring for the planet. A global sense of accountability, “consideration for future ecology”, and changes to consciousness all require a downshift to the individual, local level. The project was initiated in the spring of 2022 in Kyiv, the artist having found himself in the epicentre of warfare.
In the Donate project, exchange practices or the gift economy are not based on money. Electricity is the equivalent, one spectators can contribute to support the continued operation of Svitlychny’s installation (e.g. by reducing household electricity and heat consumption).
A calculator and table for symbolical energy “donations” have been uploaded to the website https://donate-wh.com. A maximum of three “donations” can be made during the exhibition. Detailed donation instructions have been displayed on a monitor screen forming part of the display.
