When I was researching into Viktor Misiano, I came across an interview he conducted with a Ukranian group called the R.E.P. (Revolutionary Experimental Space) Group. The article is titled "R.E.P.: The Art of the Multitudes (Community)". They discuss the globalisation of the world, which led to a backlash, resulting in attempts to defend local autonomy, individuality and ethnic identity. Similarly to the NSK, the R.E.P. seeks to develop local brands based on these local identities.

The group was established by young Ukrainian artists in 2004 in Kiev as a reaction in accordance with the Orange Revolution. The Orange Revolution was a number of protests that occurred in the Ukraine in the wake of the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election which was claimed to be marred by corruption, voter intimidation and direct electoral fraud.

The Orange Revolution was the first instance of such phenomenon as contemporary art in social and cultural contexts, and became an opportunity to negotiate conditions for its way of existing in a new political reality. Which is why the R.E.P. chose public space as an area of their artistic experiments. However there were also no alternatives, because art galleries, institutional background and art critique did not exist yet.

The R.E.P.'s work has strong ties with its Ukrainian history, but also attempts to create a new national language for contemporary art in a country that has been somewhat milked of its cultural heritage. There are instances where once Ukrainian artists' careers would lead them to Moscow, they would become Russian artists. Artists such as Archipenko, Malewicz, and Tatlin all come from a Ukrainian background.

In 2005 R.E.P. won a national competition to represent the Ukraine at the Venice Biennial. The new government however wanted more traditional forms of art, leaning toward a folk aesthetic, and did not warm to the R.E.P.'s modern language and forms. The government eventually sent more folk works and the R.E.P. reacted by creating a new artistic movement called "Patriotism" which concerned universal art that was accessible for all.

" The new language for art established by REP and the new artistic tendency called “Patriotism” is from one point of view an ironic commentary to the official cultural policy of the Ukrainian state, but on the other hand is a patriotic gesture and reflection on the ways of development and existence of contemporary art, its language, importance and its potential impact on social and political reality." - Magdalena Kownacka



The R.E.P. currently have works exhibited at the White Box gallery in New York, in part of a multimedia group show curated by Denise Carvalho and Monika Szewczyk. The show is particularly about the globalisation in former Eastern European countries now known as Central Europe. The press release says that the show explores two sides of an "iron self-definition: one, which has become central, therefore losing all the privileges of subversion, resistance and rebellion of its previous state of difference and otherness; and another, still a memory of itself, a self-stereotype humoring itself as a parallel reality."