PRESENTATION: Jannis Kounellis-Untitled 1997/2025

Born in 1936 in Piraeus, Jannis Kounellis settled in Rome in 1956, where he studied in the Academy of Fine Arts and in the ’60s already emerged as one of the protagonists of the Arte Povera movement in Italy. By using materials such as iron, carbon, fire, wood, stone etc he promotes through his wall constructions and installations the primordial poetical nature of things and their political – cultural depth.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: National University of Kyiv Archive

In 1997, Jannis Kounellis created an installation in Kyyiv, the setting was the apse of a beautifully restored Baroque-era building, which, at the time, housed the Soros Center for Contemporary Art. This historic structure had once served as the original site of the prestigious Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, lending the project a profound sense of continuity between past and present. Jannis Kounellis’s concept could be summed up in a single, elegant image: a row of raw steel I‑beams stretching the length of the nave, each one supporting a suspended church bell. That was the entire blueprint. Yet inside its simplicity lay an enormous reach. True to his Arte Povera roots—those “continual forays outside the places assigned to the artist,” as Germano Celant once put it—Kounellis set only two conditions: every bell had to be made in Ukraine, and every bell had to carry its own history. While we worked, he spoke often of the Ukrainian avant‑garde, both before and after the watershed year of 1917. He quoted the painter‑poet David Burliuk, who saw “deconstruction as the opposite of construction” and believed that any structure could be nudged, shifted, displaced. Burliuk had revived the term facture* to remind us that every surface is an archaeological dig into material itself. Kounellis may not have name‑checked facture, but his thoughts traveled the same terrain. “Painting is older than it looks,” he mused. “Its order of composition goes back further than the canvas, and it knows how to pull the pieces together—how to make synthesis happen in space.” To rebuild his 1997 installation now is to remember that Kounellis grew up in wartime: World War II followed by the Greek Civil War. Growing up amid these crises left a profound imprint on Kounellis, shaping his sensitivity to themes of suffering, displacement, and social struggle, which later emerged in his conceptual and material-based artworks. The iron plates and industrial scraps he loved were not macho trophies; they were survivors’ testimonies. “Since the war,” he warned, “we have only contradictions.” His art kept that fracture visible while searching, stubbornly, for wholeness. Those contradictions feel painfully current. As Russia’s war grinds on, reviving the bells in June 2025 becomes an act of defiance and care—proof that art and life still decide their own terms. Back in 1997, tracking down a matched set of historic Ukrainian bells was half spy novel, half treasure hunt, solved only when a tenacious architectural historian from the west pieced the clues together. Today, the provenance of every bell is proudly in the open. The Museum of the Bells at Lubart’s Castle in Lutsk has lent fourteen bronze voices, Orthodox and Catholic, cast between 1688 and 1925. Kyiv’s St Sophia Cathedral has sent several more. And, honoring Kounellis’s original wish, new clappers have been poured for the bells that had fallen silent—not so they can ring, but so their silence holds the possibility of sound. Centuries of craft, decades of conflict, and one artist’s fierce belief that even broken things can learn to resonate again.

*Fakture or Faktura is a term in art that refers to the texture, surface quality, and material presence of an artwork. Originating from early 20th-century Russian avant-garde movements, particularly Constructivism and Suprematism, faktura emphasizes the visible handling of materials and the physical process of creation. Rather than concealing brushstrokes or construction methods, artists used faktura to highlight the honesty of materials and the labor involved in making the work. This approach rejected illusionism and embraced a direct, tactile engagement with the medium. In works by artists like Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich, faktura became a central expressive element, aligning with the idea that art should reveal its structure and material essence. It was not just a visual feature, but a philosophical statement about the relationship between form, function, and truth in art.

Photo: Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 1997, Installation view, Soros Center for Contemporary Art-Kyyiv, Courtesy , Courtesy National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy

Info: Curator: Marta Kuzma, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, The Old Academic Building, Hryhoriya Skovorody St, 2, Kyiv, Ukraine, Duration: 15/6-1/9/2025, Days & Hours: Daily 9:00-18:00, www.faktura10.org/