About us

ArtPole Agency specializes in creating multidisciplinary projects. It collaborates with musicians, writers, performers, artists from different countries and invites to team up translators, cultural anthropologists, philosophers. The result is new combinations of disciplines, new methods of work, new oscillations. A search. A peculiar trait of ArtPole’s projects is their continuity, the ability to transform and be new every time through the addition and exclusion of certain disciplines, changing participants and locations.

ArtPole Agency was founded in 2007 in Kyiv by Myroslava Ganyushkina (now Head of the agency) and Olia Mykhailyuk (Director) together with colleagues with whom they had been organizing the Sheshory (later rebranded to ArtPole) International Festival since 2003. In the first years of its existence, the festival combined land art with authentic and world music. Later, site-specific theatre, performances, and video art were added, and the festival became multidisciplinary. Particular attention was paid to improvisation and collaborative projects created directly during the festival. Specific characteristics of the location, its landscapes, music, rituals were always important. For twelve years, the festival took place in different regions of Ukraine.

In 2008, Olia Mykhailyuk met Ukrainian writer Yurii Andrukhovych, and ArtPole Agency received an invitation to collaborate on his joint project with the Karbido band. ArtPole offered to add a visual component on which they worked together with the VJ-group Cube and generally curated the project. Later it grew into a trilogy Samohon-Cynamon-Absinthe. For the first time, Olia Mykhailyuk appeared as a video poetry author. Collaboration with Yuri Andrukhovych still continues in the form of a multimedia performance “Albert, or the Highest Form of Execution” and a multimedia collage “An Endless Journey, or The Aeneid” directed by Olia Mykhailiuk.

In 2013, the idea of the project “rozdIlovI” was conceived by Olia Mykhailyuk, combining her visualization with poetry by Serhiy Zhadan and music by Oleksiy Vorsoba. Later, an additional component became a dance by Andrea Maria Handler. Now the project exists in two versions — music + visualization + poetry and music + visualization + dance, a kind of dialogue between people and between artistic disciplines.

During 2014, many changes took place. The ArtPole festival ceased to exist, with its last two events having been held in Lugansk and Ivano-Frankivsk regions. In the Spring of 2014, Olia Mykhailiuk spent in Crimea and Donbas where an invasion by Russia was underway. Her notes became the material for the series of articles for one of the most popular Ukrainian online newspapers “Ukrayinska Pravda”. Back then, Olya Mykhailyuk began working on the project “RememberMINT”, which is a combination of documentary interviews and photo/video essays from Luhansk and Donetsk regions at the beginning of the armed conflict and elements of a performance. In 2021, a video version of rememberMINT was edited and presented.

Also at the end of 2014, Olya Mykhailyuk shows her first performance ___just___went___away, she also creates other individual art projects. Now she is working on a personal exhibition.

In 2015, ArtPole Agency created two prominent multidisciplinary projects — “Sum of Sun” in Kyiv and ENTERtheEAST in Berdyansk. Both combined different disciplines, such as music, cinema, visual arts. and included not only entertainment but also a substantial research part. ArtPole’s psychogeographical research continues in the projects :::track::: (2014-2022), “Granica” (2017), and “Crimea. The third dimension” (2021).

Projects pulsate each with its unique rhythm. We observe, analyze, implement new ideas that, from time to time, refurbish and transform older projects. In such cases, we return but do not repeat ourselves — our projects keep evolving. So don’t be surprised if you hear titles you already know, there will always be something new and unexpected behind them.
Olia Mikhailyuk / Myroslava Ganyushkina