LOCATION: Exercishallen, MAP. Buy festival tickets
Repeat After Me, 2022 is an one-channel video installation that invites audience participation through the encouragement, “Repeat after me.” The work encourages shared reflection on the experience of war by recreating the sounds of weapons embedded in memory and prompting the audience to mimic them. Through this embodied engagement, the viewer is made to physically encounter the sensory traces of war.
In the work Repeat After Me, 2022 we see refugees from the East of Ukraine who, fleeing the threat of war, found shelter in a temporary camp in Lviv. They share their experience of the sounds of war. Reproducing various types of weapons, they conduct a kind of karaoke instruction, which, while transmitting simple sound sequences, is still unable to convey the experience that exists nearby, the experience that has become the price for this knowledge.
The project was inspired by “In Case of Emergency or War,” a survival guide issued by the Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security under the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and Information Policy just weeks before the war broke out. The work notably incorporates the stage setting of karaoke—a representative format of Japanese popular culture—creating a context that enables viewers to immerse themselves in and empathize with the testimonies. This method allows the extreme reality of war to be confronted in a visceral and immediate way.
Open Group – Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga is a Ukrainian collective founded in 2012 in Lviv, and since 2015 it has been scattered across different countries, with members living in Ukraine, Poland, Germany and the United States.
Their work has been presented internationally at institutions and exhibitions including High Line, New York, USA (2025); Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland (2025),601artspace in New York (2025), Serlachius in Mänttä (2025), the 8th Yokohama Triennale (2024), Albertinum in Dresden (2023), the 4th Autostrada Biennale in Prizren (2023), Belvedere 21 in Vienna (2023), and Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York (2022). Repeat After Me II was presented in the Polish Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Photo:© Piotr Czyż
