Mykola Karabinovych
Mykola Karabinovych often combines his personal experience with explorations of various musical genres, including folk music, and provokes other artists to create new works.
In his work entitled The Voice of the Delicate Silence, Karabinovych addresses the tragic history of repressions, deportations, sadness, mourning, and sacrifices through the lens of his family history. The artist’s great-grandfather, an ethnic Greek, was arrested and deported to Kazakhstan in 1949, where he died 5 years later.
The search for information and his father’s memories about his grandfather reminded Karabinovych of “rebetiko,” a Greek music genre that emerged in Athens in the 1930s and is strongly associated with persons relocated from Asia Minor. In The Voice of the Delicate Silence, Karabinovych asked the musician Yuriy Gurzhy to create a rebetiko song, and traveled to the town of Shelek (formerly Chilik) in Kazakhstan to install a symbolic monument to victims of repressions. The monument is a loudspeaker that broadcasts a piercing mourning song over the silent Kazakh steppe.
First special prize
Commenting on works by the first special prize Mykola Karabinovych, the jurors said:
“The jury was struck by the outstanding work by Mykola Karabinovych. We recognize its minimal and simple formulation that contradicts the complexity of a historical and yet intimate narrative. It is a dedicated performative gesture turned into a humble transient monument occupying the memory of the repressed, regardless of their ethnicity or nationality.”