Kharkiv’s festival life continues: from June 14 to 23, 2024, an event called “Kharkiv Sea” took place, where musicians, artists, actors, and all those interested explored an imaginary image of the city through stage and visual art. The festival was guided by the concept of shaping a unique identity for Kharkiv, linked to both ancient and modern mythologems and cultural phenomena.
The “Kharkiv Sea” festival spanned more than ten cultural venues, including the DRUK cultural and community center in Kharkiv. Our cultural space played a significant part in the event, as numerous meetings, workshops, and exhibitions were held here, allowing people to experience the city’s magic by symbolically “diving” into its creative processes.
The “Kharkiv Sea” program featured lectures, performances, excursions, concerts, and stage shows by both professional companies and amateur collectives. The festival’s founders, designer Olena Mordyk and copywriter Deniza Glezina, decided to create a festival that would let people see the city as if through the waves of an imaginary sea. At the heart of their concept is a vision in which the sea metaphorically represents the space for perceiving Kharkiv’s myths in their deeper, meta-meaningful existence. Kharkiv becomes a topos where technology and artistic freedom unite into a single, powerful egregore of urban futurism.
On June 15 at 2:00 PM, DRUK hosted an event dedicated to the topic of myth in the context of Kharkiv. Deniza Glezina organized a “Myth-Making” workshop, explaining the mechanisms of myth-making and how artists, writers, and representatives of other creative fields can deliberately work with myths to create new images of the city. Participants were encouraged to discover their own attitudes toward Kharkiv’s heroes and symbols. Deniza stressed that contemporary art can highlight facts and events, giving them an intriguing interpretative angle.
That same day at 4:00 PM, DRUK held an ARTIST TALK, where several artists and photographers presented their exhibition works related to exploring the Kharkiv myth. Moderated by curator Mariia Drobiazko, the contributors discussed how they depict the city and what ideas lie behind each piece. Some strove to convey nostalgia, others focused on an urban modernity, while still others highlighted wartime realities and how they shape Kharkiv’s image in the public mind.
On June 22 at 4:00 PM, DRUK hosted the staging of a play called “In Development,” featuring young theaters and amateur collectives, including the “Ocheret” Theater—whose executive director, Anastasiia Nesmiian, is DRUK’s theater program coordinator. Also participating were the OPG post-theater (which includes DRUK’s head of literature, Vladyslav Radchenko), “Tetra,” and the theater-poetic laboratory “Quantum of Time.”
In addition, there were several readings organized by Iryna Rozhenko and Oleg Mykhailov’s dramaturgical laboratory. This array of productions made the festival genuinely multifaceted, as each collective has its own creative temperament—and thus its own view of what the contemporary Kharkiv cultural space can be.
On that same day, DRUK hosted a pop-up exhibition and an event called “World Café.” In a pop-up format, any interested artist or designer could display a visual work for a single day and freely interact with visitors. Moments of exchange occurred, as various creative perspectives intersected and inspired each other. At the same time, “World Café” offered gatherings for open communication and the exchange of items or ideas. Those who registered in advance could arrange mini-workshops, present handmade items, or even give talks on cultural and social issues. The publications “Kylym” and “Liuk” helped coordinate these activities, but the general idea was to break the rigid boundaries of formal exhibitions and create an open marketplace for ideas.
Shortly afterward, in the evening, DRUK held a project pitching session aimed at supporting independent cultural initiatives. Participants shared their plans in areas such as theater, graphics, literature, performance, or musical experiments. Alina Bohdanovych ran the session, intending to show that the circle of creative people in the city remains large despite all challenges. Consequently, each presentation at DRUK gave participants and organizers a basis for forging new cultural partnerships—hosting “Kharkiv Sea” at DRUK spurred deeper creative communication. Here, every visual projection or rhythmic composition became a ritual synchronizing digital streams with a person’s inner experience, cultivating a new sensitivity to space and history.
On June 28, for the final day of the “Kharkiv Sea,” organizers invited everyone to return to DRUK, where an electronic party was waiting for them. Conceived as a closing celebration that encapsulated the idea of symbolically swimming through the waves of the city’s imagination, the program included music from various performers, including Apols, Bongdan, and HSPD—a Ukrainian musician who, together with Lysy4ka and the electronic label someone records, debuted the “MINDCRAFT” mini-album at DRUK in 2022. Arkadiia Yurchenko, DRUK’s music program curator known as D’ark, combined sounds and visuals to create the atmosphere of the Kharkiv Sea’s sonic waves.
The “Kharkiv Sea” festival aimed to discover new venues in the city for cultural events, as finding them under wartime conditions has become its own challenge. Within this context, we introduced our DRUK space.
The “Kharkiv Sea” festival proved to be an event that encouraged residents and guests to see Kharkiv’s urban and mythological spaces from a new perspective. DRUK became a multifunctional hub where one participant after another arrived with exhibitions, performances, or music tracks. In an atmosphere of openness, we debated, received feedback, exchanged gifts and ideas, once again confirming that artistic and social concepts develop precisely where people engage in urban myth-making.
Through performances, electronic sound-based initiations, and exhibition practices, a new city semiotics is emerging—one that points back to the deepest layers of myths. Thus, Kharkiv appears not only as a geographically industrial center, but also as a space where urban narratives become a conceptual layer in which myths of a new era take shape—myths that arise simultaneously from a prehistoric past and an ultra-modern future.
