Collaboration with Brooklyn-based pioneering nonprofit performance center ISSUE Project Room.
Three commissioned AV works uniting artists based in Kyiv and New York City. Working through the simultaneity of war and multiple crises, these three pairs engaged in a collaborative creation that highlighted physical distance - yet revealed a deeply layered interdependence.
Distant Pairs
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Madison Greenstone is a musician, writer, and clarinetist of TAK Ensemble. Their solo practice, exstatic resonances, explores ‘shatteringly intense’ phenomenological, material and spatial expressivities of sound through richly noisy timbral actions, often performed on the clarinet at a high volume. This work was released to critical acclaim on Relative Pitch Records in 2023. Recently their music explores dreamlike acoustic mirages, spatial interferences of difference tones and beating, and draws inspiration from fiction writer Yoko Tawada's proposition that there is no such thing as a room with a fixed size. Madison performs across the US and internationally as a soloist and chamber musician. They have been presented by the New York Philharmonic, Blank Forms, Cafe Oto (UK), LAMPO, KM28 (DE), ISSUE Project Room, the Vigeland Mausoleum (NO), Night of Surprise (DE), and Bangkok Arts and Cultural Center. As a writer, Madison has contributed critical essays on experimental music to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb (k-verlag), Blank Forms (Alien Roots), Museum of Art and History in Neuchâtel, Contemporary Music Review, and LAMPO Publications. They can be heard on Important Records, Relative Pitch, Longform Editions, Mengi, Another Timbre, Greyfade, Wandelweiser Editions, Impakt Kollektiv among others.
Anton Saenko, originally from Sumy, now based in Kyiv, is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, installation, photography, performance, and land art. His practice explores the intersections of space, materiality, and perception. A graduate of the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (2019), he also studied at the Kyiv Academy of Media Arts and Method Fund courses. In 2018, he was a Gaude Polonia resident in Poland. His solo exhibitions include Griazne (Dymchuk Gallery, Kyiv, 2021), Phantom (The Naked Room, Kyiv, 2020), and Dark Space (Closer, Kyiv, 2015). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Point of View (Galeria Labirynt, Lublin, 2018, curated by Waldemar Tatarchyk) and Into the Dark (32 Vozdvizhenka Arts House, Kyiv, 2016, curated by Hudrada). His work has also been featured in major art events such as the Second Biennale of Young Art (Kharkiv, 2019), the international land art symposium in Mogrytsia (2019), and the Festival of Young Ukrainian Artists at Mystetskyi Arsenal (Kyiv, 2017). In 2023, Anton received the Special Pinchuk Art Prize, and in 2024, he participated in La Biennale di Venezia.
Labyrinth of Gazes is a kinetic sound installation devised collaboratively and draws from ongoing conversations about the cyclicality of return, the inherent difference in repetition and recurrence, Paul Klee’s angels, the destructive processes of history, and the presence of circles (metaphorical and literal) in each of the artists’ practices. Labyrinth of Gazes rotates as a moon-like presence, coolly bearing witness throughout the course of its movement, influencing without intervening, an uncontainable form creating blindspots and interferences.
IT FEELS LIKE THE END OF THE WORD is an audiovisual work exploring distance, memory, dissolution, resilience, and dialogue across time. Shot in both Kyiv and New York, the artists’ combined perspectives reveal an ethereal yet surreal and unsettling shared world. Physical distance is dissolved into dreamlike conversation, and between split-screen visuals emerges a dialectic of stark yet ephemeral landscapes, body movement that appears only marginally human, resounding silences, and weighty absence. Through the musical and visual exchange, this piece begins to trace what forces dictate our collective movement and transition amidst a tense reality—shouldering echoes from the past, reaching towards the unseen, illuminating the shadowy and invisible, or stepping into the future.
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Eden Girma is a composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumental musician hailing from Madison, WI. Having grown up at the nexus of widely varying and vibrant musical traditions, Eden creates through a variety of audio-visual-technological media—bridging realms such as popular music, improvisatory collaboration, expressionism, and experimental electronics. Through a genre-bending ear and a poetic lyricism, their artistic practice and work not only resonate with individual hearts, but bring people closer together in a spirit of intimacy and empathy.
Maryana Klochko is a music producer, vocalist, and film composer based in Kyiv, Ukraine. In her works, she often engages with the unconscious—through lyrics and vocal parts, she seeks a balance between the real and the fictional. She perceives music as storytelling, finding visual images within compositions that come to life through sound. Trained as an interior designer with an MA from the Lviv Academy of Arts, her background in visual composition deeply informs her musical sensibilities. Her work spans experimental, pop, club, post-apocalyptic folk, and ambient music. As a film composer, Maryana has scored multiple award-winning films, including Stop-Zemlia (2021), A Picture to Remember (2023), and Utopians (2022). Her distinctive approach to film scoring—marked by immersive sonic textures and emotional depth—earned her the Ukrainian Film Academy’s Golden Dzyga Award for Best Original Music Score and Best Song for Stop-Zemlia in 2021.
Time Zone Response (Відповідь часового поясу) initiates an emergent call and response with the sounds and experiences of home, in different time zones. Focusing on their immediate surroundings and engaging with them through the body of sound, the artists use the medium of field recording to capture the spaces they are living in at this moment, as great uncertainty—both in Ukraine and the U.S.—disrupts their sense of the future. “Listening together, we hear place, vulnerability, obstruction, frustration, fear, heart, solace, understanding, helplessness, joy and despair, all in process; contextualized, conjoined, scrambled, mediated and remediated, unfolding. With Time Zone Response we agitate muddled beginnings sounded in collective listening.”
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Oleksii Podat is an avant-garde composer and producer from Sloviansk, Ukraine, whose work bridges experimental soundscapes with an intuitive pop sensibility. Engaging with both small and large musical forms, his compositions feature prominently in audiovisual art projects and films. A distinctive voice in Ukraine’s experimental music scene, Oleksii is known for his radical approaches to sound production, blending avant-garde playfulness with raw sonic intensity. His self-proclaimed genre, melodic noise, has become a defining element of his artistic identity, pushing the boundaries of contemporary composition.
Suzanne Thorpe is an electroacoustic flutist, sound artist and scholar. She couples critical listening with acoustic ecology, improvisation and technology to craft relational and immersive sound engagements that reveal dynamics within human cultures and nature's systems. She has performed and exhibited internationally and has contributed to a significant discography as a founding member of the critically acclaimed American group Mercury Rev. She has received numerous grants, awards and residencies, and has had the distinct pleasure of performing with a heady roster of wonderful performers and improvisers worldwide. Thorpe is currently Assistant Professor of Sound Studies at Manhattan University, a Visiting Scholar at NYU, and remains co-founder and director of TECHNE, a nonprofit arts-education organization dedicated to dismantling social and cultural barriers in technical learning environments.
ISSUE Project Room is a pioneering nonprofit performance center, presenting projects by interdisciplinary artists that expand the boundaries of artistic practice and stimulate critical dialogue in the broader community. ISSUE serves as a leading cultural incubator, facilitating the commission and premiere of innovative new works. https://issueprojectroom.org
In 2020, ISSUE Project Room created the Distant Pairs Series in response to the suspension of in-person programming during the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on travel. Pairing artists in disparate locations who cannot work together in “traditional” ways, the Distant Pairs Series examines the collaborative process, methods of working, and partnership amidst constrained conditions. Time Based is a platform for advancing contemporary music and sound-centered practices in Ukraine. Through organizing mentorship sessions, commissioning new works and collaborations, and presenting new pieces in Ukraine and beyond, the project is dedicated to artistic expressions that are aesthetically and politically relevant to our time.
This project was created during russia’s war against Ukraine. We are grateful to the Armed Forces of Ukraine for their protection.