The Black Sea as Site: Archiving Unofficial Art of 1980s–90s Ukraine

This paper explores the notion of site-specificity in unofficial artistic practices of the 1980s–90s in Ukraine, with a focus on the topography of the port city of Odesa and a broader approach to the Black Sea as a discursive site for artistic thinking. It is grounded in the Odesa Conceptual Art Archive, a digital resource compiled and curated by the presenter in 2024 in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The archive was assembled through direct work with artists and the digitization of their private collections, as well as in collaboration with Ukrainian museum holdings. For the first time, it makes publicly accessible artistic documentation from the Odesa scene of the 1980s, including photographs of performances, apartment exhibitions, artists’ statements, and correspondence. The curated archive, together with ongoing research into the 1990s, exemplifies how artistic communities challenged the spatial politics of the late Soviet state and later responded to political and economic tensions in independent Ukraine and the Black Sea region. In these practices, artists employed the seashore—with its histories, poetics, and myths, as well as its trade and military infrastructures—as an imaginative and productive space. This ongoing research marks a first attempt to approach broader art historical entanglements in the Black Sea region.