Konzertperformance Babyn Jar: Yuriy Gurzhy und Mariana Sadovska

With the Ukrainian Institute, the duo addresses the Babyn Yar massacre in their performance. Spatial conception: Anna Mesniankina

Yuriy Gurzhy and Mariana Sadovska Spatial conception: Anna Mesniankina

Together with the Ukrainian Institute, the ensemble addresses the Babyn Yar massacre in its performance as an artistic engagement with historical places of horror and memory.

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About Yuriy Gurzhy and Mariana Sadovska:

Mariana Sadovska comes from Lviv and lives in Cologne. When she is not traveling with one of her diverse projects, in which she combines archaic songs from her Ukrainian homeland with contemporary sounds, she composes music for international theater productions.

Yuriy Gurzhy grew up in Kharkiv and lives in Berlin. As a musician, DJ and author, he combines tradition and pop culture in an unmistakable way. His albums and compilations appear on renowned labels; With the Ukrainian war diary for the Tagesspiegel he has created a chronicle of the present in his homeland.

In 2021 they appeared together with the singer and cantor Svetlana Kundish in the production Songs for Babyn Yar (director: Josephine Burton) on stages in London, Berlin and Kyiv - a musical-theatrical work that does not museumize the Babyn Yar massacre, but rather as an open wound that bleeds into the present.

Four years later, Sadovska and Gurzhy are retying this thread - with a concert that sees memory not as a compulsory exercise, but as an artistic necessity: radically subjective, sonically risk-taking and supported by the conviction that the past is always present. What does it mean to remember when the war is back, when yesterday explodes into today? Together they look for possible answers.

14 © Marcus Lieberens, Oleksandr Osipov

About the performance:

The duo develops a repertoire of their own compositions, traditional songs and settings of Jewish-Ukrainian poetry from different eras. Hasidic nigunim glide into Ukrainian folk tunes, village wedding melodies turn into incantations, and the drones of Sadovska's keyboard intertwine with Gurzhy's electric guitar lines, fragmented beats and sampled echoes of the past. The music of the two becomes a vibrating navigation system through a labyrinth of identities in which memory is a living being, sometimes uncomfortable, often demanding, always indispensable.

About the Ukrainian Institute:

The Ukrainian Institute is a state institution dedicated to the global promotion and presentation of Ukrainian culture, as well as establishing and maintaining cultural relationships with other countries. The aim of the institute is to strengthen Ukraine's international presence through intercultural cooperation. Since 2018, the institute has been operating worldwide with its headquarters in Kyiv. In 2023 it opened its first branches in Germany and France. In 2025, the representative of the Ukrainian Institute in the Netherlands began her work. The Ukrainian Institute is affiliated with the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Exhibition:

Anna Mesniankina - Triptych on Babyn Yar

The painter Anna Mesniankina created part of a triptych on the subject of Babyn Yar, which is projected in the church interior and presented as part of the event. In this work she deals with the question of memory in the area of ​​tension between history and the present. The image is shown parallel to the performance, creating a dialogic space between artistic reflection and physical-performative experience.