Masoch Fund
 Art in Space, 1993 |
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Mausoleum for the President, 1994 |
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The Best Artists of the 20th Century - Pol Pot, 2001 |
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The Best Artists of the 20th Century - Mao Zedong, 2001 |
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The Best Artists of the 20th Century - Sigmund Freud, 2001 |
 The Last Concert Tour in Ukraine, 2000 |
The Masoch Fund is a Ukrainian art association founded in 1991 in Lviv by Roman Viktyuk, Ihor Podolchak and Ihor Dyurych. Its artistic practice is connected with the tradition of European actionism and Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics”. The Fund is named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, which makes a reference to the marginal fields of culture and society and also underlines the locality (Sacher-Masoch was born in Lviv).
The ideological principle of the Masoch Fund is “Aesthetics contra Ethics”. Podolchak and Dyurych are called the masters of perfectly elaborated provocations. The Masoch Fund reveals and criticizes the fetishist mentality of modern society and tests the institutional boundaries of contemporary art.
The Masoch Fund focuses on the social, political and economic context of the Ukrainian society. Unlike other action artists whose work often refers to personal experience (Marina Abramović) or mysterial impermeability (Viennese Actionists), the Masoch Fund emphasizes the active role of its audience. It can be best compared to the work of Slovenian artists’ collective IRWIN, Danish artists’ group Superflex and the tandem of Svetlana Heger and Plamen Dejanov.
In 2006–2010, the Masoch Fund included a subsidiary production company MF Films that produced the films Las Meninas and Delirium.
The project involved two stages. The first stage was a personal exhibition of Ihor Podolchak in the outer space. The exhibition took place on board of the space station Mir on January 25, 1993. The project was documented on video (5 minutes). The exhibited objects included Untitled (1990), The Look Through (1991). The third engraving that was planned to be exhibited was dismissed by a doctor from the mission control center due to its explicit erotic content. The second stage involved sending Podolchak's artbook Jakob Böhme to the space station and its subsequent putting into orbit. According to the authors’ conception, the book on orbit would become the first "ARTificial" satellite of the Earth. Technical problems at the space station Mir in the late 1990s prevented this part of the project from being realized. Art in Space project brings up the problem of existence of a work of art outside the cultural context and, to some extent, calls out to revise the evaluation criteria for art.
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