Artists: Mykola Ridnyi in conversation with Anna Witt

Secession Podcast: Artists is a series of conversations featuring artists exhibiting at the Secession. This episode is a conversation between the artist Mykola Ridnyi and the board member and artist Anna Witt. It was recorded on September 15, 2023 in the context of the exhibition:

Mykola Ridnyi
15.9. – 12.11.2023

Mykola Ridnyi’s generation of Ukrainians grew up in a climate of increasing orientation toward the West and the European Union. This emancipation from Russia found expression in the 2004 Orange Revolution and was defended in the Euromaidan events of 2013–14. It was a process that went hand in hand with the emergence of a confident Ukrainian arts scene, among whose leading exponents Ridnyi ranks. Long before graduating from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts in 2008, he was instrumental to the formation of a politically active arts scene, both as an artist in his own right and as a curator and author. He was a founding member of the art collective SOSka, whose SOSka gallery-lab, an artist-run space that existed from 2005 until 2012, was a key contribution to the local artistic infrastructure. Ridnyi’s curatorial project Armed and Dangerous (2017–2021) prompted him to begin developing a platform for collaborations between Ukrainian moving-image artists and filmmakers. In 2022–23, he curated several Ukrainian film and video art screening programs at DAAD-Galerie, Berlin; MAXXI, Rome; Museum Folkwang, Essen; and the National Gallery, Sofia. More

Anna Witt, born in Germany in 1981, lives and works in Vienna and Berlin. Her artistic practice is performative, participatory, and political. She creates situations that reflect interpersonal relationships and power structures as well as conventions of speaking and acting. Her work has been shown at the SEMA Seoul Museum of Art; the Secession, Vienna; the 1st Vienna Biennale at MAK; the Gallery of Contemporary Art Leipzig; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York; Kunstmuseum Bern; and the MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, among others, and she has had solo exhibitions at Museum Belvedere 21 Contemporary, Vienna; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, and Gallery Tanja Wagner, Berlin, at Marabouparken konsthall, Stockholm and Stacion—Center for Contemporary Art, Prishtina, Kosovo. She took part in Aichi Triennial in 2019 and 2013; the Lux/ICA Biennial of Moving Images, London; the 6th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art, and Manifesta 7 in northern Italy, and is the winner of the Outstanding Artist Award of the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport (2020), the Otto Mauer Prize (2018), the Art Prize ‘Future of Europe’ (2015), the BC21 Art Award (2013), and the Art Prize of the Columbus Art Foundation (2008).

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Editing Director: Mykola Ridnyi & Anna Witt
Editor: Paul Macheck

Programmed by the board of the Secession
Produced by Christian Lübbert