Oksana Chepelyk is a contemporary Ukrainian artist. She followed her studies at the Art Institute in Kyiv with post-graduate work in Moscow and Amsterdam University and new media studies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada. She also completed a post-doctoral programme at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany and a Fulbright Research Program at UCLA. She has exhibited widely internationally, including at MOMA (New York); ART FAIR (Stockholm); MCA (Zagreb); Deutsches Historisches Museum (Berlin); ISEA 2000 (Paris); Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna) and has received a number of prestigious international awards. In 2003 Oksana Chepelyk became leading researcher at the Modern Art Research Institute of Ukraine and since 2007 has been art-director of the International Festival of Social Sculpture. In her work Oksana uses installation,video, new media, performance, photography and public art. Her works raise problematic questions about the functioning of the social environments at a time of paradigmatic changes in the global world.
During her residence in Almaty, Oksana Chepelyk planned to continue her “City Code” research; the city as a neural network, the new nervous system of the urban landscape, requires identification of its words, signs and images. In Almaty, the artist intended to collaborate with local partners and communities to create her own vision of one of the eight districts of Kazakhstan’s cultural capital by video mapping the “City Code”. This work was presented in the public art programm of the annual Festival of Contemporary Art ARTBAT FEST, dedicated to the city of Almaty, its spirit and citizens.
Additionally, Oksana planned to give a lecture entitled “The International Festival of Social Structure and Other Researches into Urbanistic Practices” to Kazakh artists participating in the School of the Art Gesture and to organize together with the school a collective performance – an urbanistic gesture-intervention, turning it into a social sculpture project, engaging in a dialogue with the local citizens in the process of artistic creation.
