May 9 – June 22, 2025
601Artspace
88 Eldridge St, New York, NY 10002

Hours: Thursday – Sunday at 1:00 – 6:00 PM
Thursday, May 8, 2025 at 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Opening Reception
Friday, May 9, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Curatorial walkthrough with curator Marta Czyż and Magda Sawon and guests.
Saturday, May 10, 2025 at 4:00 PM
Conversation with the artists, with curator Marta Czyż and author Mark Lilla, essayist and professor at Columbia University. 

OPEN GROUP (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga)
Repeat After Me II and Untitled
Curated by Marta Czyż
Organized in collaboration with Magda Sawon of Postmasters Gallery

601Artspace is excited to announce a special presentation of two projects from the Ukrainian collective OPEN GROUP. Please join us for the opening reception on Thursday, May 8th from 6-8pm. On Friday, May 9th at 6pm, curator Marta Czyź and Magda Sawon will lead a public walkthrough of the exhibition, and on Saturday, May 10th at 4pm, the gallery will host a conversation with Open Group, curator Marta Czyź, and Mark Lilla, essayist and professor at Columbia University.

David Howe, founder of 601Artspace, saw Repeat After Me II at the Polish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2024 and immediately wanted to bring it to New York. He invited longtime friend Magda Sawon, a co-founder of Postmasters Gallery, to partner with 601 to produce what has become the first multi-installation exhibition of OPEN GROUP in the U.S.

Repeat After Me II (2022, 2024) features two films playing in a space that the artists describe as a “military karaoke bar of the future.” Addressing the Russian invasion and the war in Ukraine, the timeliness and relevance of Repeat After Me cannot be overstated as it marks the profound impact that war, any war, has on a society. In each film, survivors imitate the sounds of the war in Ukraine, from gunfire and drones to ambulances and sirens. Microphones are set up to allow viewers to repeat those sounds if they wish. The 2022 work features “internal refugees”—those who escaped west from embattled eastern regions of Ukraine—sharing their visceral experience of the war in real time. In the 2024 work, the format is the same but the witnesses are Ukrainians now living in exile abroad, in other European cities as well as New York, reliving the sounds they recall. Together they present the grim continuity of the ongoing conflict. In the purported entertainment context of karaoke, the sounds become a form of communication between the witnesses of war and the public. Boris from Mariupol, one of the protagonists of the 2022 film, delivers a direct message which becomes a theme of the entire work: “Repeat after me, so you hear and never forget.”

Untitled, which began in 2015, aims to visualize the number of fatalities of the war in Ukraine as a continuous—perhaps endless—scroll, never to be completed. To express the grim scale and physicality of this data, the members of Open Group have continuously noted their encounters with new acquaintances, positioning their names in contrast to the numbers of those deceased. At the center of the gallery sits a printer on a gigantic table, printing new names onto a continuous paper scroll, along with numbers of those killed in the war as they are confirmed. As the artists meet new people during the exhibition, their names will be added to the data. Thus far the names of the living always fall behind the numbers of the dead.

601Artspace will present Repeat After Me II in a raw, dystopian garage space on the 3rd floor of 88 Eldridge Street—temporarily adapted for this project following its presentation at the Venice Biennale. Untitled will be on view in the ground floor gallery.

Back in 2015, we agreed to keep a record of the new people we met, so that one day we could try to match the number of people killed in the war and understand the physical reality and the simultaneous abstraction of war statistics. At the time of the exhibition in Venice in 2017, according to the UN Human Rights Mission in Ukraine, the number of people killed in the war had reached 9,940. We hoped to catch up to this number before the end of the war, which had already become another frozen conflict on the Russian border. Today, in the third year of the full-scale war, accurate casualty statistics are unavailable for various reasons, but we know that our project has become more and more impossible to complete. – Open Group

These works speak of war, although they do not explicitly show it. The artists talk about it through metaphor to illustrate the scale of the losses and through the accounts of witnesses who share a particular experience of war, namely remembered sounds. Both works touch on the problem of armed conflicts in the world, a human tragedy brought about only by the desire to gain power, at whatever cost. – Marta Czyż

At this time of extreme image manipulation, we are no longer in a position to trust what we see. We have been desensitized to the flow of war images because of the sheer volume of global conflicts. War has been on TV since Vietnam, and representation of gore in art and media seems ineffective to deliver a powerful jolt. These two projects by Open Group bring the war closer to the audience precisely because they address the periphery of representation, the sounds and numbers that dig deep into the abstract core of human tragedies. – Magda Sawon

Open Group (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga) is a Ukrainian collective founded in 2012 in Lviv. Since 2015, it has been scattered across different countries, with members living in Ukraine, Poland, Germany and the United States. They have held solo exhibitions at institutions including Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland (2025); Serlachius, Mänttä, Finland

(2025); Kulturdrogerie, Wien, Austria (2023); HB Station, Guangzhou, Сhina (2023); Labirynt gallery, Lublin, Poland (2022); Аrsenal gallery, Białystok, Poland (2017); PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv, Ukraine (2014); Closer art centre, Kyiv, Ukraine (2013).

Their works were featured at the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale 2015. In 2016, Open Group curated the show entitled “Dependence Degree, Collective Practices of Young Ukrainian Artists 2000-2016” BWA Awangarda (Wrocław, Poland). In 2017, the group’s work was presented in frames of the Future Generation Art Prize@Venice 2017 (collateral events of the 57th Venice Biennale). In 2019, the Open Group was the curator of the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 58th La Biennale di Venezia. In 2024, Open Group represented Poland at the 60th Venice Biennale with the project “Repeat After Me II”. The artists’ works are in the collections of the KADIST, Paris (France) and San Francisco (USA); Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (Poland); ARS AEVI, the Museum of contemporary art in Sarajevo; MOCA NGO/ Ukrainian Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA) collection, Kyiv (Ukraine); National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv; Museum of Contemporary Art in Kherson (Ukraine) and in private collections.

Marta Czyż

Art historian, independent curator, critic. Lives and works in Warsaw. Curator of the Polish Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 (with an exhibition by the Ukrainian collective Open Group). Her practice draws on archives and recent developments in art history to influence culture and social movements. She researches the history of exhibitions in Poland and the profession of curator.

She has realized her exhibitions at the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, BWA Zielona Góra (Poland), MOS Gorzów (Poland), and the National Museum in Szczecin (Poland) and other. In 2020, she curated the 10th Contexts Festival of Ephemeral Arts in Sokolowsko (Poland) and the 9th Youth Triennale at the Centre for Polish Sculpture in Oronsko (Poland). In 2022, together with Yuriy Biley, she realized the exhibition “Society of Discouragement” at the History Meeting House in Warsaw. She regularly publishes in the art and opinion press (Dwutygodnik, Vogue Polska, Polityka, miejmiejsce, Wysokie Obcasy, Camera Austria, Follow.art). In 2015 she published (together with Julia Wielgus) the book “In the frame of the exhibition – conversations with curators”. Scholarship holder of the Minister of Culture. Member of the AICA.

Established in 2005, 601Artspace is an artist-centered, non-commercial space that produces exhibitions, talks, screenings and special projects. In its pursuit of novel and experimental ways to engage with art it partners with artists and curators on exhibitions that other spaces are unlikely to support. 601Artspace gives its collaborators the necessary resources to fulfill their vision and provides itself and everyone it works with enough freedom to fail. Throughout its two decades of programming 601Artspace has been guided by curiosity, all the while learning through, from and together with its community.

Postmasters Gallery December 13, 1984 – December 13, 2024

On the gallery’s 40-year anniversary co-founders Tamas Banovich and Magda Sawon have concluded Postmasters project. The gallery’s archives have been donated to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Going forward they will both stay engaged in different roles within the art world and art community globally.

This project is supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Polish Cultural Institute New York.