Repeat After Me II: Open Group (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach and Anton Varga) | London

Opening reception: 6 February, 6-8pm

Nguyen Wahed is pleased to present Repeat After Me II, a two-channel video installation presented previously in the Polish Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia in 2024. It features civilian refugees who recount their experiences of war through remembered weapon sounds – they imitate these sounds and invite the audience to do the same. Visitors are encouraged to join in this re-enactment within a space staged as a futuristic military karaoke bar. Here, the soundtrack is not composed of familiar hits, but of gunfire, cannonades, howls, and explosions, while the lyrics are descriptions of deadly weapons. This is the soundscape of war, recreated by its witnesses. By repeating after them, we begin to learn the language of their experience.

The exhibition presents films from different stages of the war, underscoring its grim continuity. In Repeat After Me (2022), the voices belong to so-called internal refugees who fled from eastern to western Ukraine. In the 2024 video, these testimonies shift to a transnational context. The protagonists – still from Ukraine – now reside in various cities across Europe and beyond: Wrocław, Berlin, Vienna, Vilnius, Tullamore, and New York, among others. This second film expands the geography of displacement and portrays the characters at a moment when the war in Ukraine has lasted for over two years and become embedded in our everyday reality. Their stories are intended to serve as a universal message – a collective portrait of refugees from around the world, each time represented through a shared community of sound. Today, the Ukrainian voices could just as easily belong to Palestinians, Yemenis, Libyans, Syrians, or Haitians. The entire world is a landscape of displacement and escape; no refuge can be considered permanent or secure.

The protagonists of the project attempt to articulate an experience that has left them with the unerring ability to identify the sound of various weapons. This skill reveals a universal aspect of life in war zones: when survival is at stake, the senses sharpen – keen vision and acute hearing become essential.

This work may be understood as both a warning and a manual of specialised knowledge, which survivors of war pass on to their audiences – their potential successors. The weapon sounds they reproduce, reverberating against the backdrop of bustling streets and quiet courtyards in countries currently at peace, are deeply unsettling. No one can assure that the cities featured in the 2024 video will remain untouched by war. Repeat After Me II is a manifesto against all armed conflict, delivered in a peaceful form today.

This exhibition is supported by the Polish Cultural Institute London, under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland, and by Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.

Biography:

Open Group was founded in 2012 in Lviv, Ukraine, by six Ukrainian artists. It currently consists of three members: Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga. Placing the notion of “collective work” at the core of their practice, the group has operated through collaborative projects involving people from diverse fields over specific periods of time. Their works are often structured as what they term “open situations” ― experimental explorations of the interaction between people and particular spaces. As both visual artists and curators, the trio continues to investigate the dynamics of contemporary visual culture through an experimental lens. Their practice deeply engages with socio-political realities of the present, transforming the intersection of personal experience and pressing global issues into a variety of visual forms.

They held solo exhibitions at institutions including High Line, New York, USA (2025); Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland (2025); Serlachius, Mänttä, Finland (2025); 601artspace, New York, USA (2025); Labirynt gallery, Lublin, Poland (2022); Аrsenal gallery, Białystok, Poland (2017); PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv, Ukraine (2014 and 2025); Closer art centre, Kyiv, Ukraine (2013). Their works were featured at the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale 2015. 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, the Open Group was representing Poland at the 60th Venice Biennale with the project "Repeat after me II".