Artists at war

Arrangør

Dansk Komponistforening

Moderator

Juliana Hodkinson, forkvinde Dansk Komponistforening

Panel

Albert Saprykin, artist, co-founder & head of Kyiv Contemporary Music Days / Henriette Borg Reinholt, regional chef EU’s østlige nabolande / Kateryna Alymova, curator, producer, manager & co-founder of Kyiv Contemporary Music Days / Les Vynogradow, project team Kyiv Contemporary Music Days

As a result of the full-scale invasion in 2022, the Ukrainian new music community has become scattered and atomized. Young musicians studying in the EU receive a high-quality education, but they do so in an environment indifferent to the Ukrainian context, and they gradually begin to think within foreign categories. Those who remain in Ukraine are exhausted by the war and deprived of a space for collective, free thinking out of which new meanings can emerge.

Therefore, Kyiv Contemporary Music Days (KCMD), an educational and network platform for contemporary music, is developing a project with the goal of designing and implementing a new music festival in Kyiv. The festival itself will not be a product but a tool: Working on something real creates the conditions for participants to rethink their own assumptions about what new music is and what place it occupies in culture. The role of KCMD is not to author the content, but to maintain the conditions under which participants become active agents.

This afternoon representatives from KCMD will unfold their project and the vision, and how they have worked to support artists in Ukraine and in exile since the invasion. In conversation with colleagues from Denmark they will discuss how exchange and international collaborations can help sustain artistic fields and a cultural sector in times of war and rebuild the cultural sector after a war.