Groundbreaking LGBT Exhibition Opens In Kyiv

Carlos Motta is a Columbian artist, who currently lives in New York. He has received a  Future Generation Art Prize established by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation. Hromadske  International’s Andriy Radchenko spoke to Motta about his solo exhibition “Patriots, Citizens, Lovers…” at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv, which opened on October, 31st in 2015.

This is Motta's second LGBT exhibition in Ukraine. His work is known for engagement with the history of queer culture and activism, and for its insistence that the  politics of sex and gender represent an opportunity to articulate definitive  positions against social and political injustice.

Motta says that one of the key objectives of the exhibition is to think about the ways in  which the conflict and the war have impacted lives, politics, and the development of  the LGBT communities and movements.

“The  situation for sexual and gender minorities in Ukraine is not very good. There are really high indexes of discrimination. People still live in regimes of silence  and fear”, Motta complains.

“I think education is incredibly important to  change the imagination around issues of exclusion and discrimination ”, the  artist asserts.

Ukraine is one of the Europe's most homophobic places, according to ILGA-Europe rating. In recent two years the country has experienced a spike of violence against gay people. Almost all of those cases weren't publicly condemned or prosecuted. Ukraine still doesn't have any kind of legislation protecting its LGBTI minority's from different kinds of discrimination and hate crimes.