This cluster of painters managed to go their creative way from the first ‘quiet’ exhibition December (Декабрь) in 1993 to bright large-scale projects at the beginning of the 21st century. One can quite clearly trace three stages in the formation and development of the art commune. The first stage lasted from 1993 to 1995 and is now defined as ‘classic squat’, since it was in the early 90s that the students of the Kyiv Art Institute, who then lived in a hostel on 69/71 Lukianivska Street, moved to Olehivska Street (buildings 11, 22, 37, 39). At first, empty houses raised the students’ interest not even as accommodation, but as a certain Klondike, where among piles of garbage they could find, for instance, a vintage bottle for a still life scene or numerous other items. Artists began to populate the street in the early 1990s. For some of them, the area was only a workshop while for others the place was used for accommodation and as a space for creativity.

The squat on Olehivska Street co-existed with the squats on the streets of Paris Commune and Velyka Zhytomyrska in the same cultural space. This also proves the uniqueness of the squat movement in Kyiv, when the term ‘squat’ was used not in its social legal sense, but rather as a local cultural phenomenon in the post-Soviet environment with its own internal specifics and peculiarities of existence.

The second stage lasted between 1996 and 2006 and is currently associated with the activities of the Fictitious Gallery Expedition (FGE) group. The project existed in its virtual space while being embodied in some certain earthly coordinates, which were on the Kyiv hills. Thus, the squat on Olehivska, having no commercial direction, abandoned art institutions and mass media in favor of absolute, undeclared freedom for public access to society.

A new vector of movement provoked the third stage in the life of the creative group and that was the intensification of exhibition activities since 2008. The artists held 8 group exhibitions, involved a significantly wider audience, and their works drew the interest of the mass media space, gallery owners, and collectors. As a result, the squat on Olehivska turned into a well-known artistic phenomenon outside Ukraine, acquired the status of uniqueness and originality. The squat on Olehivska is one of the few creative communities in the territory of Ukraine that has existed in the national art space for 24 years.

The stages of creativity of the above-mentioned art-commune are closely related to the landscape, cultural and historical phenomenon, Mount Schekavitsa, which, having absorbed the pagan, Muslim and Christian heritage, is located in the very center of Kyiv Podol. The dominant group among the ‘immigrants’ were students of the art institute: Anatolii Varvarov, Volodymyr Ershyhin, Volodymyr Zaichenko, Ihor Konovalov, Ruslan Kutniak, Konstantyn Maslov, Viacheslav Mashnytskyi, Mustafa Khalil, Volodymyr Padun, Eduard Potapenkov. It is essential to mention that the artists did not form a stable grouping. It was a fairly dynamic and unregulated community.

The work Squat on Olehivska Street was fairly organic in the context of Ukrainian art in the 90s. Back then, most of the exhibitions were not resonant, since they were not advertised or promoted and they were not created for commercial purposes. But it was precisely this marginality that formed and polished individualities, then expanded the scope of creative activity, and, finally, led to an understanding of freedom of creativity.

O. Konovalova, PhD in Art History, Borys Hrinchenko Kyiv University