Aleksander Najda and Vasyl Savchenko, installation view of “The Ground of Things,” 2024, at Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art/Photo: Robert C. Osborne
I was talking to a friend of mine who is an art history professor about the challenges of teaching her students how to engage in slow looking in front of an artwork. She may want to bring her class to see “The Ground of Things” at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art for practice.
“The Ground of Things” developed from an ongoing collaboration between poet Aleksander Najda, originally from Poland but now based part-time in Chicago, and Vasyl Savchenko, a Ukrainian artist currently living in Poland. The project’s parameters are straightforward: Najda will write a poem and share it with Savchenko, who will create a drawing in response, or vice versa. WGS BWA, Contemporary Art Gallery (Old Mine) in Walbrzych, Poland hosted the project’s first iteration featuring poems paired with response drawings. At UIMA, Savchenko’s drawings are the impetus for Najda’s poems.
Aleksander Najda and Vasyl Savchenko, installation view of “The Ground of Things,” 2024, at Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art/Photo: Robert C. Osborne
Savchenko’s drawings, rendered in rapid-fire strokes, smears and clouds of matte black charcoal, are stark and striking. By and large, they are non-representational, although the preliminary outlines of a head, landscape or architectural element emerge in some of them. As a group, the drawings call to mind a proto-alphabet that eludes decisive interpretation. They bolster the argument that a pared-down approach can have a powerful visual and emotional impact.
Similarly, Najda’s response poems are spare in form—but not content. Written in the ekphrastic mode, the poems address the fugitive nature of experience, the texture of space and place, and the confounding movement of time, which sometimes arches back on itself like an ouroboros. The poems reference and converse with a range of philosophers, visual artists and musicians spanning nearly three millennia, including Heraclitus, Ezra Pound, Francis Bacon and Igor Stravinsky.
Aleksander Najda and Vasyl Savchenko, installation view of “The Ground of Things,” 2024, at Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art/Photo: Robert C. Osborne
Some of Najda’s poems are koan-like (“Talking about something/it is not talking/it is not something/it is about”), prodding viewers to adopt an intuitive, contemplative framework rather than trying to decode everything. The koan analogy is also useful when considering Savchenko’s drawings and their relationship to Najda’s poems.
Both the drawings and poems are presented on the same size and type of unframed paper so their contents appear to float against the white ground. From several feet back, the drawings read like script while the poems become minimalist geometric drawings. With the distinctions between mark and text erased, we’re reminded of how language and communication evolved, from sound to symbol to syntax.
Aleksander Najda and Vasyl Savchenko, installation view of “The Ground of Things,” 2024, at Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art/Photo: Robert C. Osborne
Most of the show is installed in a linear format, like a long sentence. On UIMA’s north wall, however, Najda and Savchenko have hung the drawings and poems in an incomplete grid, where the correspondence between a particular drawing and poem is less obvious. This shift in organization invites the viewer to start at any spot—poem or drawing—and move through the installation, discovering new resonances between words and images, depending on the path taken.
One of the most evocative poems in the exhibit pays homage to the contemporary classical composer Kaija Saariaho, a trailblazing artist who combined live music performances with computer-generated sound and vocal elements like whispered poems and Buddhist chants. An obituary from last year described her enduring desire to find in her scores “an organic meeting place between material and form.” A similar commitment and ambition animate the collaboration behind “The Ground of Things.”
“The Ground of Things” by Aleksander Najda and Vasyl Savchenko is on view at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, 2320 West Chicago, through August 30.
