anton tkachenko

artist | curator | co-founder garage 127

Anton Tkachenko (born 1994, Kharkiv, Ukraine) is an artist and curator. He studied at the Kharkiv National University of Civil Engineering and Architecture as well as at the Kharkiv Pedagogical University. He is a co-founder of the self-organized art space Garage 127, founder of the contextual gallery NULLA, a member of the VIDSOTOK collective, and a co-founder of ZIEGEL/ ЦЕГЛА in Graz, Austria.

In his artistic practice, he works with themes of instability and the transformation of experience, exploring the human condition in circumstances where familiar systems of support collapse and are replaced or substituted by institutions or communities that can temporarily stand in for one’s sense of self during periods of instability, crisis, or reassessment of values.

An important motif in his work is an engagement with the invisible — imagined or irrational forces that emerge as a means of making sense of experience and as a form of psychological support. In this context, belief functions not as a religious category, but as a tool for survival, grounded in repetition and the ritualistic nature of processes, transforming the surrounding environment into an inventory for artistic practice. This inventory itself becomes Anton’s creative method: constructing tools for reflection and creating a collage-like statement that appears as a complex question rather than an ultimate answer.

A separate aspect of Anton Tkachenko’s activity is his curatorial practice. His projects often function as environments of interaction, where a shared experience is formed through the tension between the real and the imagined. An important element of this practice is the creation (or construction) of conditions for interaction and the collage-like assembly of ideas and experiences from different artists. The artist views this process as a search for responses to complex social challenges as well as to his own metaphorical concepts. In these situations, Tkachenko often assumes the role of an observer, consciously distancing himself from direct participation and acting more as a supervisor of the process’s development. The experience gained in such contexts is later transformed into artistic works.