Anton Karyuk

Anton Karyuk explores themes of social ecology, humanism, marginalisation, and identity, drawing on his personal experience as a queer migrant. Born and raised in Dnipro, a large industrial city in Central Ukraine, Karyuk graduated from the Prydniprovska State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture with an MA in Architecture in 2011. At the age of 22, he moved to Kyiv and worked as a journalist for various publications, starting his career as a professional artist in 2015. Having previously created abstract canvases, Karyuk gradually moved towards more interdisciplinary media such as installation, video art and performance; in 2020, he also studied the latter at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, with professor and artist Janusz Bałdyga as his supervisor. Karyuk moved to Lithuania in 2017 and has been living here ever since. Besides personal creative practices, he is also a team member of the annual Vilnius Queer Festival – Kreivės. The artist’s work has been presented in both solo and group exhibitions at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (Poland), Alte Feuerwache Loschwitz (Germany), Galerie Rasch (Germany) and Kulturhuset Leoparden (Sweden), among other institutions. He has participated in artist residencies in Ukraine, Lithuania and other countries, received the Gaude Polonia grant from the Polish Minister of Culture and several individual state grants for Lithuanian culture and art creators, and was nominated for the PinchukArtCentre prize for young Ukrainian artists in 2020. Immersing himself in personally and socially sensitive topics, Karyuk looks for ways to use abstract visual language and minimalist execution. Not limiting himself to galleries and museums, he also brings his works to wider audiences in the public realm.

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Men’s Beach

7 min. 20 sek.

The video work, based on footage shot in Palanga, depicts the resort’s men’s beach – a well-known meeting place for homosexual men during their summer holidays. The meditative video also draws parallels with Simeiz, a resort town located in the Ukrainian Crimea, currently inaccessible due to the Russian occupation. After the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, my memories of Simeiz, one of the main summer dating spots for gay men in the post-Soviet space, remain only in a few photographs and fading sensations.

The northern and southern resorts of the post- Soviet space offered “spaces of increased sociability between men with same-sex attractions and circulation of information about (homo)sexual relations. These were spaces where many men gained their first tangible knowledge of sexual coding and ways of communication between men with same-sex desires. ... They provided new ways of self-organising and conditioned different community developments which managed to escape strict rules of Soviet places and eventually led to the rise of transnational belonging.”* In this video work, I reflect upon opportunities lost and gained, and on my own personal search for a place on the map of constant social and political change.

*Augustas Čičelis Reading Between the Lines: Spatial Communities of Men with Same-Sex Attraction in Late 20th Century Lithuania (Central European University, 2011)

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