VOLTA Art Fair New York 2024
The Naked Room is among the participants at the VOLTA Art Fair New York 2024, presenting works by Alina Kleytman, Sasha Maslov, Kinder Album, Kseniya Bilyk, and Anton Saienko.
With over 50 exhibitors from 18 countries across 5 continents, the 2024 New York edition of the fair seeks to break the traditional homogeneity of the market under the new leadership of Artistic Director Lee Cavaliere. Taking on a transformative vision, the central Town Square and Ukrainian Pavilion stand out as key curatorial features, emphasising collaboration, commonality, and cultural dialogue. Along with The Naked Room, Dymchuk Gallery (Kyiv) and Ya Gallery (Lviv, Ukraine) will also be represented at the fair.
The Ukrainian Pavilion serves as a testament to resilience and creativity in the face of war. In collaboration with the nonprofit organisation Razom, it brings together renowned galleries to showcase the work of artists from Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora. This pavilion, the first of its kind to be presented at VOLTA, reflects the fair’s new mission to support artists and galleries impacted not only by conflicts but also by other factors that hinder their access to major art markets like New York, ensuring the sustainability of their artistic practices and businesses.
“Tapestries by Kseniya Bilyk, ceramics by Kinder Album, photography by Sasha Maslov, monumental paintings by Anton Saienko, and bioinstallations by Alina Kleytman—to be witnessed at The Naked Room stand,” comment Maria Lanko and Lizaveta German, the gallery’s cofounders and curators.
Over the past few years, Kseniya Bilyk has explored the mechanisms of constructing collective memory and visual propaganda. Her images, instantly recognisable, but at the same time devoid of context, act as a trigger that sets off the process of manifesting the visual unconscious. In addition, the aesthetic seduction of the works themselves immerses a viewer in a world of fantasy, sensuality, and pleasure.
In Kinder Album’s ceramic works, as well as in her practice in general, the artist symbolically and literally exposes uncomfortable topics that have been pushed out of public discussion. She explores the boundaries of intimacy, sexuality, and personal fantasies. Equally boldly, Kinder Album mocks gender stereotypes, objectified sexuality, and domestic violence—issues that are devalued by social silence. The conflict between the provocative topics and the “childish language” of their artistic embodiment draws the viewer’s gaze back to where our intellectual chastity attempts to divert it.
Sasha Maslov’s works are part of a documentary photo project entitled Ukrainian Railroad Ladies, which takes over and expands upon his long-term interest in marginalised and invisible professional or social communities.
The railway is the most branched and available type of transport in Ukraine, in absence of well-made roads and dead air communication. But Maslov's project is not really about transport, but rather about the culture of everyday life that is produced by this transport. It has a special kind of a long road romantic aura, with strangers travelling by your side and the practice of domesticating uncomfortable conditions. Dressing up in pants, inappropriately festive dinners and breakfasts, warm conversations over a drinkglass, and ordinary flirtation with travellers intend to socially normalise this quite cruel experience of travelling by the Ukrainian railroad.
Railroad ladies are posing against the background of their post stations like owners of fairy palaces, where each differs from the previous and represents their mistress's character and taste. Despite exhaustion in their eyes and objectively bad conditions of work, "railroad ladies" emancipate from this context, enchanting the viewer with a perfect composition and sweet aesthetics of everyday life.
Anton Saienko started as a landscape painter and continues to work with nature. However, the plein-air now exists only in his imagination—a memory that finds its expressive realisation in the studio. There is no logic in his painting; associations, thoughts, and desires are completely deconstructed and layered to become a homogeneous or textured stain. Yet, we can still discern a scene and a landscape that aspire to become abstract.
In his works, Anton Saienko paints a natural landscape that cannot exist in reality. He strives to find his own language and create the effect of depth, inviting the viewer into another dimension—a space free for interpretation. Day and night, sky and earth—everything is mixed as if in a centrifuge, moving away from the linearity of time and the straightforwardness of narrative. This lack of order and the frenzy of the works are a natural continuation of Saienko’s illogic—a whirlwind of consciousness, both individual (the artist’s) and collective (ours, as viewers of his works).
Alina Kleytman identifies her artistic approach as “hysterical realism.” Her investigations delve into diverse concerns, ranging from psychological and physical body boundaries to themes of black magic, abusive relationships, and depersonalisation through self-aggrandisement, subjectively embodying today’s political and social realities. At the fair, we will show Kleytman’s work BIOINSTALLATION: PROSTHESIS (2022—2023). Lack enough fat or brains, eyes turning yellow and a liver failing, maybe feel heartless? The artist offers that the most repulsive and foolish person will look fantastic and be perceived with great interest thanks to the infinite ugliness and absolute uselessness of their prosthetics. These magnificent implants, made from the tissues and organs of sad, poor, and ugly idiots, will instantly and permanently make a person truly beautiful and popular!
Fair Opening Hours:
Wednesday, 4 September, VIP Collectors Private View | 5—9 pm
Thursday, 5 September—Saturday, 7 September | 12—8 pm
Sunday, 8 September | 12—5 pm
VOLTA New York at Chelsea Industrial: enter from 535-551 W 28th St, New York, NY 10001
