When viewers entered the gallery where the exhibition of Monika Zawadzki was installed they were confronted by a tent and fireplace, both of them easily associated with the living areas of the first societies. In this way Zawadzki, whose work was also presented in the exhibition The Biggest Delight is To Avoid Contact with Society, in Warsaw (2006), creates a situation that refers to the rituals of community creation.

The Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922-32 presents a small selection of British photographer Richard Pare’s massive archive of nearly 15,000 photographs of modernist Soviet architecture in Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. The exhibition, on view at the Graham Foundation’s prairie-style Madlener House, was part of an original exhibition produced by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Framing the project as a documentary enterprise, The Lost Vanguard posits that the sites captured by Pare were largely unknown, not only in the West but also within the Soviet Union, during the long period of neglect and inaccessibility in its later, closed years. Pare’s post-Soviet photographic project began in 1992 and continued for 15 years, offering one of the first opportunities to catch brief glimpses of these “lost” modernist edifices. His photographs reveal structures imbued with a new life and use in post-Soviet space, but just as often, crumbling and abandoned, and under threat of demolition.

The First Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art ARSENALE 2012, which took place concurrently with the Euro 2012 football championship hosted by Ukraine and Poland, had a dual aim to present high-quality artworks from all over the world in Kyiv and to display Ukrainian contemporary artists to the world on par with their international counterparts. Kostiantyn Strilets's photographs reflect the project's emphasis on representation and formal concerns, where the gaze slides along the surface and meaning often arises from chance juxtapositions.