Processing 2.0. Exhibition of photographs by Vil' Furgalo

For the second year in a row, photographer Vil' Furgalo has been the focus of the Center for Urban History's exhibition activities. Today, telling or writing about him is often retelling urban stories and memoirs written by different people, both Furgalo himself and his entourage.

Processing 2.0 is a continuation of the exhibition-as-research of Vil' Furgalo's photo archive entitled "processing" and organized by the Center in 2020; moreover, it is a kind of summary. After all, when the processing exhibition was almost over, we received more than three hundred black-and-white photographs, printed by Vil' Furgalo himself. This finding was the answer to many questions we had during the exhibition-as-research.

Until recently, we only dealt with the huge archive of Vil' Furgalo's negatives, which we continue to digitize today, and a small number of slides and slide collages showing his original approach to working with images. Due to this archive, the photographer has become quite famous. In recent years, a clear image has been formed of Vil’ Furgalo as a photographer who documented the Lviv youth and informal environment of the 1980s-1990s.

New photographs, however, have shown that Vil' Furgalo not only photographed tirelessly in the streets but also experimented extensively with images in his laboratory. His completed prints, that is, the photographs he printed with his own hands, are in stark contrast to what we have seen so far in the archives. In his works, he tries to get rid of the documentary and realistic qualities of photography, which was widespread in the 1980s and 1990s.

At the Processing 2.0 exhibition two views and ways of evaluating the author are presented, complementing each other and helping to understand his photographs. Printed photographs by Vil' Furgalo expand our understanding of experiments in Lviv photography in the 1980s and 1900s and testify to the interpenetration between photography and other visual arts. Instead, his archive, which is preserved in negatives and digitized, reveals the essence of his daily practices and is a valuable source of history, a document of the city's and its community's life.

WORKING HOURS

• Wed. — Fri from 12.00 to 19.00
• Sat. — Sun. from 12.00 to 18.00

Free entrance

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We are grateful to Ihor Nikitin, Andriy Polyakov and Roman Barabakh for their cooperation.

The exhibition was made by

Curatorial group: Oleksandr Makhanets, Viktoria Panas, Bohdan Shumylovych

• Oleksandra Davydenko, exhibition design
• Sofia Davydenko, Khrystyna Davydenko, graphic design
• Anastasia Zasiedko, mediation on the exhibition
• Regina Zheleznyakova, digitization
• Maryna Kurushyna, literary editingAndriy Masliukh, translation
• Sofia Dyak, consultation
• Maryana Mazurak, communication support
• Tetyana Fedoruk, financial support
• Oleksandr Dmytriiev, Zoryana Slyusarchuk, technical support

The exhibition is implemented within the Going Out to the City: the Lviv Street and Artistic Practices of the Early and Late 20th Century project supported by the Lviv City Council and the Focus on Culture program.