Irina Danilova “25 Years of Project 59”

Bronx River Art Center (BRAC)

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Curated by Yulia Tikhonova and Olga Kondur

Bronx River Art Center presents “Irina Danilova: 25 Years of Project 59”: This Retrospective of Ukrainian-American Artist Irina Danilova. The show will present installations, performances, video, events and interventions of this mid-career international but decidedly American immigrant artist.

The exhibition will examine Danilova’s art through the eyes of like-minded (Russian/Ukrainian) immigrant curators:

Yulia Tikhonova, Coordinator of Gallery and Museum Services, Eastern Connecticut State University, and Olga Kondur, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art History, Pennsylvania State University. Both have an in-depth knowledge of pre and post Soviet nonconformist artistic practice, and particularly the rarity of women artists in this mix. Tikhonova and Kondur strongly identify with, and support, the struggle of women artists in general, and particularly in the still male dominated arts circles of Eastern and Central Europe. Through thoughtful curatorial analysis, this exhibition aims to locate the art of this ingenious multi-disciplined and multi-national artist on the contemporary map of conceptual and participatory art.

Yulia Tikhonova observes Danilova’s aesthetic origins in pre-Perestroika Soviet Russia. According to Tikhonova, “If you consider Irina Danilova a Russian artist, you are greatly mistaken. Danilova occupies a unique position amongst a long list of her (mostly male!) compatriots who escaped the reactionary and isolating reality of Soviet society and made America their home. While still in Russia in the 1980s, she joined the group of Moscow Nonconformist Artists, who borrowed Fluxus’ stream of consciousness, unruliness, and absurdity as the best weapon to combat the crumbling edifice of Soviet pre-Perestroika reality. Transnationalism was at the heart of the Fluxus program and it has fueled the spirit of Danilova’s cross-border practices”.

According to Olga Kondur, “Irina Danilova’s life-long art project is based on a deceivingly simple concept of a randomly chosen two-digit number, 59, which she uses to intervene in all possible spheres of human existence, ranging from everyday life and socio-political realms to aesthetic matters and metaphysical inquiries. On the surface, Danilova’s art appears to be obvious, she has been collecting or recording every single evidence of 59 she encounters in the world for the last 25 years - material objects which contain the number in various media. The obsessive and utopian nature of this project poses a broader question: what is the potential of a single random criterion in building its own world of relationships? Danilova’s idiosyncratic project reveals that such a world is far from being simple and obvious.”

Trained as an artist in Ukraine (BA), Danilova immigrated to the United States in 1995 and received an MFA degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York City (1996). She has been teaching at Kingsborough College of CUNY in Brooklyn, NY since 2002. Irina has participated in numerous group shows in museums and galleries throughout the US, including the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University, Smithsonian Museum, Islip Museum, and Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, as well as major art spaces including the Mattress Factory in Atlanta, Spaces Gallery in Cleveland, Elizabeth Foundation, Gallery Project Space, the Bronx River Art Center, Vilcek Foundation, and the Center for Book Art in New York. Internationally she has shown her work, performed and lectured, in Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Italy, Germany, Iceland, Australia, Chile, France, Israel, and the UK. Despite this prolific career, she has not had a solo survey or retrospective exhibition yet. This show, and its associative catalogue, with in-depth curatorial essays, intends to bring to light this ingenious and prolific multi-disciplined and multi-national artist.

Danilova has had a long history with BRAC, having curated two ground-breaking exhibitions in our galleries - “e-Europe”, in 1999, an early internet-based exhibition of Eastern European artists that included live transmission with artists from Poland, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries; and Brurel: Shattering Phenomena, 2014, an exhibition of artists from Russia and New York that mined the impact on local communities and individuals by the Chelyabinsk Meteorite and Superstorm Sandy for its unique cultural content. We look forward to giving this extraordinary artist and individual her own stage to shine her star upon.