by Eve Rogers // Oct. 21, 2025
Hailing from the industrial landscapes of Kherson, Ukraine, Anton Kats is an artist, musician and educator whose work explores memory, displacement and identity. Now based in Berlin, he has developed a multifaceted practice encompassing sound, performance and collaborative research. Under his musical alias ILYICH, Kats investigates how migration, learning and unconventional experiences shape action, intention and perception. His projects traverse temporalities and perspectives, weaving personal histories and collective narratives.
His forthcoming album and video ‘Sudnozavod’—meaning “shipyard” in Ukrainian—traces the layered histories of Kherson’s shipyards while drawing on Ukraine’s underground musical archives. The project envisions these sites as zones of departure and return, exploring cycles of disappearance and renewal. Themes of reincarnation and reinvention run throughout, framing the future as a kind of afterlife in which hope emerges from the aftermath of loss.
‘Sudnozavod’ will be presented at SAVVY Contemporary, opening with a film premiere and vinyl launch on October 30th, followed by a conversation with Rike Frank and a listening session on November 2nd. The exhibition embodies Kats’ vision of listening as a form of engagement and solidarity, offering an immersive and transformative experience where history, imagination and attention intersect to conceive of new possibilities.
Anton Kats / ILYICH: ‘After Hope,’ 2025, video still of performance at Sophiensæle // Photo by Johanna Piechotta, courtesy of the artist
Eve Rogers: Your practice engages with the idea of “sonic antifascism.” Could you explain what this means for you and how you develop it in practice? How do you see it shaping the ways you compose, perform and create spaces for listening in the context of ongoing political crises?
Anton Kats: I propose sonic antifascism as a field of practice rooted in a pedagogy of listening and sound. It carries a clear intention to better understand and respond to the violence of fascist practices, both historically and in the present. This term emerged quite organically by moving through spaces of art, music, theater, radio, academia and cultural practice. In the context of ongoing political crises, I am also interested in what sonic antifascism can become, as it carries a potential to foster transmissions and receptions across disciplines with a clear intention toward growing in one’s listening both individually and collectively. This urgency shapes a lot of my work and sound as a rehearsal of a less fascist world.
ER: I understand that you left Ukraine in 2000 to escape conscription and that during the asylum process your middle name, Ilyich, was lost. In reclaiming it as a musical identity, there’s a quiet sense of resistance, but also of remembrance. Could you speak about what that reclamation means to you today, and how the loss of that name has shaped your sense of self and belonging?
AK: Losing my middle name during the asylum process was a small bureaucratic act that erased part of my history. Out of the abyss where the name had disappeared, ILYICH emerged as a fluid, semi-fictional identity. Reclaiming it became both an act of remembrance and a space for transformation. It allowed me to speak across temporalities and perspectives, to move between personal histories and collective memories. This belonging is also to an absence, something fluid yet motionless.
Anton Kats / ILYICH: ‘After Hope,’ 2025, video still of performance at Sophiensæle // Photo by Johanna Piechotta, courtesy of the artist
ER: The new album is structured around three “grains of hope,” a term that resonates with Ukraine’s vital grain industry, now deeply entwined with global conflict and scarcity. How do these “grains” operate in the album—as metaphor, as material, or as a gesture of resilience? In other words, what does hope look like to you?
AK: The new album ‘Sudnozavod’ grows out of the performance ‘After Hope,’ which follows the traces of a ship called Universal Hope, built in my hometown Kherson for India in the 1970s. According to ship registers, the vessel is now decommissioned or lost. The performance and the album are rooted in the history of the Kherson shipyard on the Dnipro and nearby Quarantine Island, whose workers’ quarters were built from sand dredged from the riverbed. In this sense, the “grains of hope” sail with the ship both metaphorically and materially. They are grains of sand, grains of wheat and grains of hope. The performance revolves around a puzzle: If there were as many Dnipro Rivers as there are grains of sand in all the Dnipro rivers, how many grains of sand would it take for hope to hit the ground? It is difficult to speak of hope. Yet perhaps this difficulty is what also makes it necessary. I am interested in what is possible when hope is gone.
Anton Kats / ILYICH: ‘After Hope,’ 2025, video still of performance at Sophiensæle // Photo by Johanna Piechotta, courtesy of the artist
ER: Through ‘Sudnozavod’, you seem to be interrogating the ethics and responsibility of the artist in the context of ongoing war, genocide and the rise of fascism globally. How do you see performance and the act of collective listening as crucial in these times?
AK: Performance, art practice and cultural work are also sites of responsibility. Spaces where artists can shape responses not only intentionally but also specifically and especially in times of fascism and war. I understand responsibility literally as the ability to respond. In the performance ‘After Hope,’ on which the video ‘Sudnozavod’ is built, and through the exhibition and the album, I propose a space to work with grief, clarity, care and joy, where subtle acts of listening might translate into practice. The performance, which is rooted in personal narratives, oral histories and archival research also rehearses solidarity with different forms of struggle, while pointing toward anti-racist and anti-fascist positions and reminding the audience of how war is made of seemingly non-war elements. It remains vital to stay attentive: cultural work, however small or insignificant it may feel at times, remains a powerful antifascist tool that can sustain and expand political action and imagination.
Anton Kats / ILYICH: ‘After Hope,’ 2025, video still of performance at Sophiensæle // Photo by Johanna Piechotta, courtesy of the artist
ER: The video aspect of ‘Sudnozavod’ includes collaboration with visual sign choreographer Rita Mazza. How did working together on the visual and gestural elements of the project shape your understanding of listening beyond the auditory, and how do these dimensions change the way audiences experience messaging, presence and memory?
AK: I frame this part of my work through the concept of concrete listening, which arises from the intention and agency embodied in the act of listening. This shifts the focus beyond ephemeral auditory perception toward concrete and haptic residues that materialize over time, for example through situations, encounters and decisions, among many others. The collaboration with Rita Mazza deepens this understanding as Rita responds through visual listening by embracing and expanding upon the limitations of interpretation. The collaboration moves alongside the film’s sonic and textual layers, introducing a form of translation that emerges through the abstraction of sign language. This offers a space where messaging, presence and memory can be experienced rather than represented, something we invite audiences to engage with during the exhibition as one of the core elements of the work.
Exhibition Info
SAVVY Contemporary
Anton Kats / ILYICH: ‘Sudnozavod’
Exhibition: Oct. 30–Nov. 2, 2025
Film premiere: Oct. 30, 2025; 7pm
Artist talk: Nov. 2, 2025; 3pm
savvy-contemporary.com
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