The exhibition "Alchemic Surrender" was held on July 20-21, 1994 on board the warship "Slavutych" in Sevastopol, Crimea. The exhibition was held as part of the Chersonese Games festival and was organized by the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv and its director Marta Kuzma. During the annexation of Crimea, the Slavutych ship became part of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation.
«Ukrainian cultural necrophilia, love for stopped dead and gone art forms — a perfect clinical picture”, — says the offscreen voice in the film by Oksana Chepelyk “Chronicles of Fortinbras”¹ (2001). The film, created on the threshold of the new century and the new millenium, summarizes the first decade of Ukrainian independence. Actually “a clinical picture” of culture, emerging after the iron curtain fall, was an open country, ready for the “sowing” of the new modern art forms. And that was used by Soros Foundation, which consistently embedded the branch offices of its contemporary art centres pretty much in all of the former Soviet Union countries.
«Ukrainian culture doesn’t know its own time flow», — the voice goes on. This point by Oksana Zabuzhko keeps up to date in Ukrainian art off and on. Curator Marta Kuzma, the first director of Soros Contemporary Art Centre in Kyiv, seems to pick up on this peculiarity of the Ukrainian society and Ukrainian mentality. The role of Marta Kuzma in the art world development of Ukraine of the 90s cannot be overestimated: creation of site specific artworks, philosophic interpretation of the works, curator support, looking at the art through the political lens, budgeting for the art creation, etc.
In the Ukrainian art sphere Kuzma has shown and implemented the changing curator model² in the Western world of the 1990s, who was already perceived not as a “carer”, but a “creative co-producer”: “who has a more creative and active part to play within the production of art itself”³. Arguably, it was reflected most strikingly in the exhibition “Alchemic Surrender”, which took place in 1994 in Sevastopol on the naval ship “Slavutych”, where Marta Kuzma completely played the role of a creative co-producer, and the location choice for the exhibition has become the most notable curator’s and political gesture of the project.
Kuzma has emphasised the political context of the early 1990s as the times of complete anarchy, that in her opinion bolstered the back then young artists to find their energy discharge on the unmeant for art shows platforms exactly: In a not altogether forgotten world of double think, subversive behavior provided a means for a younger generation of artists to realize projects publicly in a context characterized by an anarchical internal condition. An invitation to organize an art exhibition on a Battleship in Sevastopol seemed plausible only as a result of this condition.