Mykola Ridnyi

Mykola Ridnyi was born 1985 in Kharkiv, Ukraine. He lives and works in Berlin where he holds a guest professorship in the Lensbased class at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK).

Ridnyi graduated from Kharkiv National Academy of Design and Arts in 2008. Since 2005, he has been a founding member of the SOSka group, an art collective based in Kharkiv. The same year he cofounded the SOSka gallery-lab, an artist-run-space in Kharkiv. Under his lead, the gallery-lab was instrumental in the developing the artistic scene in the region before it was closed in 2012. Starting from his curatorial project Armed and Dangerous (2017 – 2021), Ridnyi begone to develop a platform for collaboration between Ukrainian moving image artists and filmmakers. In 2022 he curated several screening programs of Ukrainian film and video art in DAAD gallery in Berlin, MAXXI Rome, Museum Folkwang Essen, National Gallery in Sofia.

Ridnyi works across media ranging from early collective actions in public space to the amalgam of site-specific installations. Photography and moving image constitute the current focus of his practice. In recent films and images, he experiments with nonlinear montage, collage of documentary and fiction. His way of reflection social and political reality draws on the contrast between fragility and resilience of individual stories and collective histories. The body of his work created withing the last decade address the question of how to talk about violence and war but not multiply its brutality in the visual language.