Open Group: Repeat After Me 2024

What does war sound like? The audiovisual video installation Repeat After Me 2024 is karaoke with the harrowing noises of kalashnikovs and missiles.

Repeat After Me 2024 is an audiovisual video installation created by the Ukrainian Open Group collective. Repeat after Me II is a portrait of witnesses of the ongoing war in Ukraine. The videos presented were created in 2022 and 2024. All the protagonists are civilian refugees speaking of the war through the sounds of weapons they remember, then inviting the audience to repeat after them and learn in that way the soundtrack of war. Repeat After Me II shows war as a collective experience, regardless of age, background, professional and social status, giving witnesses the floor and calling attention to individual experiences of this catastrophe. Repeat After Me II was the Polish submission for the Biennale of Venice 2024.

From 10AM-10PM, free admission, in the movie theater of De Balie.

Installation view, Polish Pavolion, Biennale Arte 2024. Photo by Jacopo Salvi / Zachęta archive

Оpen Group collective was founded in August 2012 in Lviv by six Ukrainian artists. The group’s members have changed over the years, and at present they are: Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach and Anton Varga. Open Group’s works have been exhibited at such institutions as Albertinum, Dresden; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe; National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kyiv and Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle.

About Forum on European Culture
Who’s afraid of art? Now that tyrants are on the roll and more and more people in the West seem to be falling for the autocratic alternative, Forum on European Culture 2025 (June 25 – June 29) brings together international artists, writers, and thinkers to celebrate the subversive power of art and literature.

Open Group (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga), Repeat after me 2024, still from video © Open Group