Yuriy Biley
Purpose of Stay

“Purpose of the stay?” is the question Yuriy Biley hears every time he crosses the Polish border, although he has had his home here for years. For the visitors, the words spoken by the official are an introduction to a migrant fairy tale with many possible endings, each time they take on a new meaning for the artist. The opening date of the exhibition is not accidental, it relates to the 30th anniversary of Ukraine regaining independence.
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Opening of the exhibition
When: Tuesday, August 24, 2021, at 7:00 p.m.
Where: Galeria Labirynt, ul. ks. J. Popiełuszki 5, Lublin
Accessibility: The exhibition is held on the ground floor. At the bookstore, you can borrow a wheelchair and earmuffs for free during your stay in the gallery. The gallery has 6 portable induction loops. Opening translated into the Polish sign language (PJM); interpreter: Łukasz Grzesiuk.
Opening interpreted simultaneously into English – please pick up the device at the bookstore before the event; interpreter: Krystian Kaminski.
Admission: Free

At the exhibition, Yuriy Biley presents about two hundred items brought from his home in Ukraine to his new home in Poland. They become silent witnesses of a personal biography, a record of memories surrounded by a peculiar post-communist nostalgia, which turns into a question about contemporary identity. This collection consists of books, albums, coins, photographs, clothes brought in a suitcase, an old typewriter, documents, a small Soviet airplane, a sugar bag and lots of other things of different status and value. Among them, there are also several dozen works of art received from other artists.

You can sit comfortably in a cinema chair from the old days, close your eyes and listen to the story about each of these items. “Purpose of the stay?” – the question to distinguish those who are familiar from strangers takes on an existential meaning. It allows you to look at your own history from the perspective and see the role of the past in shaping the present.

The artist started working on the project in 2015 when he moved from Lviv to Wrocław, where he lives to this day.
The first edition of the exhibition took place in May 2019 in the ZŁOTY KIOSK (now NOWY ZŁOTY) in Wrocław, it consisted of 105 objects – personal items and audio stories about them.

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Yuriy Biley – born in 1988 in Uzhgorod (Transcarpathia, Ukraine). Visual artist and curator. Since 2015 he has been living and working in Wrocław. In the years 2003–2005, he studied at Adalbert Erdeli College of Arts in Uzhgorod, and in 2011, he graduated from the Lviv National Academy of Fine Arts.
Participant of artistic residencies, among others, in Prague, Amsterdam, Warsaw, and Katowice. His works have been presented in many cities of Ukraine (Lviv, Kiev, Dnipro, Kharkiv) and Europe (Berlin, Prague, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Lublin, Poznań, Karlsruhe). The artist’s works are in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kherson (Ukraine) and in the deposit at the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko.

In 2011, together with Pavlo Kovach and Stanislav Turina, he founded an art gallery in Lviv, “Detenpyla gallery”. Co-founder and member of the Open Group (since 2012). In 2013 Open Group was the winner of a special award, and in 2015 the winner of the main award PinchukArtPrize (Kiev). In 2015, as a member of the Open Group, he took part in the “Hope” exhibition presented in the Ukrainian national pavilion at the 56th La Biennale di Venezia. In 2019, Open Group was the curator of the Ukrainian pavilion as part of the 58th La Biennale di Venezia.

Since 2019, together with Magdalena Kreis, he has been co-creating an independent exhibition space called NOWY ZŁOTY (formerly ZŁOTY KIOSK). And from 2020 together with Vera Zalutskaya and Yulia Krivich, he co-creates “ZA*Grupa” (*foreign artists living in Poland).