Catalogue > At random

The Battle Over Mazepa conceptualises the historical significance and contemporary perception of Ivan Mazepa, a political and military leader of the Zaporizhian Sich and Left-bank Ukraine in the late-17th and early-18th century. Addressing codes of hip-hop culture, Ridnyi borrows the popular form of a rap battle to collide two great works of world literature associated with this historical figure: Mazeppa by Lord Byron in 1819 and Poltava by Alexander Pushkin in 1828–29. While Byron envisions Mazepa as a romantic hero, seized by love, Pushkin portrays him as a traitor in accordance with the colonial attitude of the Russian Empire. Highlighting the confrontation of these two texts, Ridnyi invited four rappers from different national and cultural backgrounds to write and perform their response to the poets’ lyrics.

Mykola Ridnyi (born in Kharkiv, Ukraine) is an artist, filmmaker and educator. He lives and works in Berlin where he holds a guest professorship in the Lensbased class at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). His works reflect social and political realities by drawing on the contrast between fragility and resilience of individual stories and collective histories. The body of his work created within the last decade address the question of how to talk about violence and war but not multiply its brutality in the visual language. Ridnyi's works has been shown internationally including the Schinkel pavilion, Transmediale and DAAD gallery in Berlin, Albertinum in Dresden, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, the 56-th Venice Biennale, The Kyiv Biennale and other venues and events.