As Long As I’m Young I Make Bad Art

2017

The text on the flag is a quote from an artwork by Mladen Stilinović, a Croatian conceptual artist, which said: “An Artist who cannot speak English is no artist”. Karabinovych writes this sentence using the Cyrillic alphabet, which underlines the impossibility of becoming a fully-fledged artist in the English-speaking, thus international, art field. In the context of the full-scale russian invasion of Ukraine, the decision of using the russian language in this work opens a new level of interpretation. The artists asks: “What is the role of an artist who speaks russian? Can an artist speak russian now?”. The author of the flag emphasizes the fact that he does not want to be an artist who speaks russian.