Exhibition of 20 Shortlisted Artists
for the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2025

February 28, 2025 – July 13, 2025

The shape of Daria Molokoiedova’s work Music of the Wind recalls that of the ‘wind chimes’ instrument, which makes sounds by moving with air currents. However, the dreamy composition, in stark contrast with the noisy Bessarabska Square, emphasizes the surreal atmosphere of the country’s everyday life at war more than it harmonizes it.

The tree, hand, frog, woman and kidneys embody the contradictory dimensions of reality in Ukraine today: the closeness of death and fear are intertwined in a dance with life, laughter, and play. The adrenal glands notably secrete stress hormones. The frog is a symbol of death in some cultures and fertility in others. Meanwhile, the tree appears to be walking, with its roots torn from the ground. This way, the artist depicts a person’s special connection with nature and home as well as roots, identity, which have become movable. Fingers frozen in motion refer to games and draws. The whimsical silhouette of a woman is an interpretation of the character of Greek mythology Baubo. For the artist, she has become an image of a female figure who embodies support and humor amid the chaos of the war.

By combining disparate symbols and images, Molokoiedova captures the chaos of the carnival spirit, often inherent in Ukrainians. No role or meaning is stable here, and fun and humor are used to address or, conversely, to avoid the complex subjects of death and tragedy. The work organically interacts with the life-affirming polyphony of the surrounding space and emphasizes the ambiguity of experiencing wartime and martial law, where conflicting emotions and actions coexist.

Tamara Turliun has created a large installation Shkurynka [Crust], which reminds us of either a collection of containers for liquids, or elongated female breasts, or flowers as they start to wilt. The artist bases her work on her own observations of family, thinking of the exhaustion that comes from caring for someone and the connection between generations. Levitating objects recreate the safe space that families create for their offspring, and show the price they pay for it.

Turliun draws parallels between maternal care and a ritual, both of which are magical and exhausting. Creating a portrait of a woman whose body bears witness to all her hard work and caring for others, she depicts the gradual change in the woman’s breasts under the influence of motherhood, work, and time. In this context, the artist speaks of a woman's loss of a sense of ownership of her body: it turns into a tool for others, goes beyond personal experience and becomes a metaphor. She takes this topic to a broader level, raising the question of exhaustion as a collective condition that affects entire generations.

The work Dust Сures encapsulates Yevhen Korshunov’s memories of his basic military training, which the artist himself calls a kind of ‘poetic introduction’ to the war. On the outside, it is a minimalist black block, and on the inside, it sort of recreates the atmosphere of a dugout — an underground shelter that houses the military. Drawings on the walls depict people with whom Korshunov lived, made friends, and communicated during his basic training. In short descriptions, the artist shares their prominent features and stories from their past or life during the wartime.

The work invites the audience to immerse themselves in soldiers’ living conditions. However, in this installation, the dugout is placed in an independent structure, separate from the walls of the art center, to emphasize the symbolic nature of this reconstruction. Importantly, Dust Сures captures the artist’s seemingly conflicting feelings: complete discomfort and coziness. In an underground dugout, there are usually many mice, and dust clogs everything, gets into eyes and makes it difficult to breathe. The artist noticed that after the third week in dugouts, on the way to training sessions in the morning, over a hundred people started coughing the same way. However, the soldiers optimized their living space as much as they could, adding various conveniences, such as a bottle that closed the door automatically, stopping the cold from getting in.

The exhibited work is focusing on people with various professions and experiences, whose paths crossed in the army. Drawing our attention on them helps to better see the faces behind the generalized image of a military servant. Thus, the work leads to reflections on the role of an artist on the front line, asking whether there is space for art in the reality of wartime.

In Anton Saenko's work Mud Hut, an abstract painting seems to emerge from the surface of the wall, resembling a mazanka clay hut. Thus, a picture that portrays nothing combines with a dense texture that references a very specific image of traditional Ukrainian housing, saturated with various connotations. In this way, the artist reveals the ‘principle of the abstract’: any non-figurative image has a specific, primary foundation, a material source. But art transforms it, and creates a part of reality that escapes interpretations, symbolic meanings, and functions. Color, texture, and light come to the forefront. The outlines of the viewers and the process of contemplation itself appear against the intense white backdrop.
At the same time, the image of the mazanka hut, as if it strives to be read and explained, loses its specificity next to the abstract painting. The surface becomes visible with its physical properties, which eventually become much more specific than any definitions. Importantly, Saenko painted over an old work to create the new one. Using the glazing technique (applying translucent paints over the base color), the artist hid the previous layers. They have not disappeared completely, remaining somewhat visible — the new work thus has its own past which is nevertheless inaccessible to the viewer.
White stands out among all the colors, revealing emptiness, exposing its own incompleteness, and evoking further potential layering and continuation. The invisible, yet present, history of the canvas; the white color hinting at a new beginning; the dissonance and complementarity of the abstract and the specific — all of this creates nuance that provokes observation and reflection.

The collective Variable Name / Назва змінна, founded by artists Valerie Karpan and Maryna Marynychenko, invites the viewer to explore the interaction between memory, body, and landscape. The project focuses on the somatic experience of space, which changes in relation to social, political, and natural shifts, now accelerated by the full-scale war. The human body is viewed as an environment of change, sensitive to the surroundings, capable of interacting with it, and changing over the course of this connection.
The first part of the installation depicts the body as an internal structure in which memory and experience are formed. It includes ceramic objects made during collective workshops in collaboration with those who have lost their physical connection to important places, people, and more-than-human life forms. These clay sculptures embody unspoken stories and are combined with interactive sound effects that respond to touch. Viewers’ interaction with the objects activates special zones that generate sounds, complementing the installation’s multisensory experience.
In the second part of the work, the artists offer a view of the body as an external material shell that is in a constant dialogue with space and the environment. The video consists of fragments of stories collected during workshops. The storyline shows three characters having a conversation in a moving space, giving voice to a polyphony of experiences. Documentary footage superimposed on the silhouettes of the characters creates a tension between personal and shared experiences, between what is visible and what remains hidden.

In his works, Anton Shebetko addresses the issues faced by the LGBTQIA+ community in Ukraine, as well as the themes of memory, loss of identity, the plurality of history, and the role of photography and archives in their exploration. The project Dear Sons and Daughters of Ukraine analyzes the mechanisms for creating the images of national heroes and manipulating the facts of their biographies. The artist rethinks memorialization processes from the queer perspective, suggesting a new meaning for the symbols of past eras.

The work includes portraits of scientists, artists, and political figures printed white on white using the silkscreen printing technique. It emphasizes how the non-heteronormative aspects of their biographies and works are invisible and inconvenient for propaganda, demonstrating the complexity of their identities. A bronze sculpture of gay porn actor Billy Herrington refers to the 2022 petition to replace the statue of Catherine II in Odesa with his sculpture — an ironic nod to the homophobic sentiment in society. A series of photographs of Soviet homoerotic sculptures, partially covered by OSB panels, symbolizes the practice of concealing monuments and suggests an alternative way of looking at history.

The project is complemented by the library of research materials: biographies, diaries and tabloids. It invites the viewers to immerse themselves in the context, do their own research, and find their own answers.

In his work Peaceful Landscape in a Nonexistent Museum, Mykhailo Alekseenko explores the theme of silence and emptiness in Ukrainian art and culture caused by historical repressions and the ongoing war.

The space through which the viewer travels encourages to reflect on the challenges Ukrainian museums are facing during wartime: art collections that have been hidden and evacuated, buildings that have been physically destroyed. The fragmented parquet is reminiscent of museum walls that were on the verge of disappearing due to enemy shelling or negligence. Perhaps the walls of a contemporary art museum could once have stood here? However, in the thirty-three years since Ukraine’s independence, no such museum has been established, leaving a tangible void in the cultural field.

Going deeper into the room, one can see a landscape — a metaphor for territory, while the frame, embellished with elements of human bones, outlines the territory's borders. The work refers either to a legend or a real story about a Soviet artist who, after returning from exile, painted exclusively apolitical landscapes. Alekseenko asks the question: can a landscape really be neutral? In this context, even a ‘peaceful landscape’ becomes politicised by social and political events.

The work invites the viewer to reflect: what do we see in Ukrainian landscapes, and how do political realities influence our perception of them? Can a landscape be peaceful?

Yuri Yefanov’s work I Watched the Sinusoidal Motion of Blue Electronic Waves until I Sensed Their Smell is a public space project that brings back memories of inaccessible places in Ukraine and provides an opportunity to create alternative scenarios for the present and the future.

This work reproduces a digital simulation of the environment in real time. Based on the artist’s memories, it recreates the currently inaccessible area in his native Gurzuf in Crimea. The landscape located on the territory of the Artek summer camp, which Russia uses for ideological education, following in the USSR’s footsteps, is now closed to visitors. However, in the work, you can see a diving championship, which Yefanov is planning to organize there when he returns. Characters controlled by artificial intelligence have fun and use specific port architecture for water games. The artist recalls that only in Crimea did he observe such unusual jumps into water, where each had its own name and was accompanied by a lot of splashes.

Anticipating the erasure of memory about inaccessible locations in Ukraine, Yefanov transports them into his own model of public space. This approach is based on Michel Foucault’s ‘heterotopia’ concept, which marks real places that ‘fall out’ of the usual order, because the rules of their existence, functioning, and flow of time are majorly different. The idealistic, yet quite realistic, scenario of the work is fighting reality and struggles with the policy of forgetting and disintegration pursued by Russia. The improvised championship free of all hierarchies becomes a counterpoint to the violence inflicted upon the landscape by the aggressor.

In Patrix, hundreds of clay figures of soldiers are frozen in various moments of training or service. They all reproduce several unique prototypes created and replicated by the artist. Turning to the image of the ancient Chinese Terracotta Army, Vasyl Dmytryk reflects on the commonality of wartime experiences in different times and cultures.
The repeated actions and shapes of countless soldiers unify their images, which is what makes the army effective. Dmytryk draws attention to the vulnerability and pliability of the human body, which is forced to submit to the demands of the state. War reduces the fates of different people to a common denominator.
In groups, the figurines seem to be protected by their numbers and cohesion. However, each of them remains fragile, especially when alone. The videos that are presented in the space alongside the sculptures, highlight this contrast. There, individual ‘soldiers’ in public spaces have become a kind of monument, open to interaction with regular people. Thus, by exploring potential methods of memorialization, Dmytryk focuses on soldiers’ fragility and vulnerability. He emphasizes this not only on the battlefield, but also in civilian life, particularly among ordinary citizens.

In this project, Maksym Khodak refers to global cinema to overcome political differences and develop a common language. The artist is trying to get in touch with the well-known Iranian opposition director Jafar Panahi by writing him a letter suggesting they create together a movie that reflects on the experience of the war in Ukraine and the role of Iranian Shahed-136 drones in Russian shelling.
In his own country, Jafar Panahi has been denied the right to make movies due to accusations of anti-government activities. The director therefore often shoots films without physically participating in the process. This approach resonates with Khodak’s idea, which creates an atmosphere of anticipation for the premiere of the upcoming movie in the exhibition space.
A marble-embossed poster shows footage of a possible plot: Jafar Panahi sits on a couch while behind him a mobile fire team shoots down a target in the sky over Ukraine, or the artist's parents ride their bicycles into a field to see the crater left by the downed drone. Breaking the silence of anticipation for the movie, the space is filled with the sound of revving engines from Khodak’s new video work. The visual sequence consists of a set of scenes cut from Iranian films where people ride mopeds (a reference to current Ukrainian slang where the word ‘moped’ is used to refer to Shahed drones).

​​Little Rights are paintings on canvas, which metaphorically reflect natural processes: they breathe, divide, and go through life cycle metamorphoses. In this way, Kateryna Lysovenko focuses on the inherent, universal ‘rights’ of bodies.
The artist points out that the war and the rise of right-wing political forces around the world have made murder, violence and control over body constant and directed at all living beings. Against this backdrop, the necessity arises to emphasise the properties of any living organism that should not be alienated by anyone, as they are given by nature. Paintings manifest the rights to life, reproduction, vision, absorption (of food or other creatures), and protection. The sea, which appears in one of the works, is linked by Lysovenko to the right to miracle and emergence of anything.
The rounded canvases seem to have become enormous cells or organisms that endlessly reproduce themselves. The processes of existence that ideologies try to subordinate, define their course, in this work are eternal and primary, and therefore divine. Cells and organisms move on their own and remain uncontrolled by any external forces.

‘What You Will Do When the War Starts?’ is the question that Vladislav Plisetskiy asked himself a month before the full-scale invasion, when Russia was rattling its weapons at the Ukrainian border. The artist found his answer and decided to make a movie — this is how the idea of a trilogy was born, in which he wonders about potential actions in case of the start, continuation, and the end of the war. What You Will Do When the War Continues? is the second part of the trilogy. The new work reflects how the chaos of the full-scale invasion is mounting, and affecting, among other things, the Ukrainian queer community, LGBTQ+ rights, and their involvement in the war.
The movie starts with a visual narrative of the artist’s own life. Growing up in Murmansk (Russia), he ended up in an orphanage when his father committed a crime. Later, he went to stay with relatives in Donetsk, and eventually arrived in Kyiv, where he joined the art and queer communities. For Plisetskiy, a phone conversation with his father becomes an introduction to the wartime events of the future, also highlighting the contrast between Ukrainian and Russian societies and their political sentiments.
What Will You Do If the War Continues? depicts the close ties between the personal and the political. The eccentric and transgressive performances, art, and parties in which Plisetskiy freely expresses himself and blurs the boundaries of gender identity are replaced by wartime turmoil and mobilization processes in society and artists’ close community. Here, different destinies and aspects of today’s reality intersect: the tragic and the comical, the everyday and the carnival. The movie ultimately captures the absurdity, the certain madness of this moment in history where hostile ideologies and life contexts coexist and confront each other against the backdrop of the war.

Rachysnkyi’s work Notes. City Kh. consists of several components, which through different media describe Kharkiv, its residents, architecture, and, in particular, the signs and local lettering, i.e., the way that letters are designed. Videos, artifacts, photographs, and photo notebooks are designed to recreate the memory of the artist’s hometown, where he spent most of his life. He left it due to the full-scale invasion and only occasionally returned throughout 2022.

‘Foraging’, which is how Rachynskyi refers to documentation, archiving, and collecting, has a special place in the artist’s work. Images and other components collected by the artist become carriers of information that help form a diverse but also visual and tactile idea of the city, or evoke remembrance in those viewers who are familiar with Kharkiv.

The photos using the bromoil technique show little-known places that are important to Rachynskyi personally. He took these pictures 5–8 years ago, but for Notes. City Kh. modified them with AI and Photoshop. This emphasizes how the mind automatically completes fading memories.

It is important that Rachynskyi is a professional graphic designer, so studying fonts and visual design is an alternative method for researching the city for him. Kharkiv may be recognized through the signs; a careful look reveals the socio-cultural and economic contexts of urban history at a particular period. The war has left an indelible mark on the city, destroying even this cultural layer, which may appear insignificant at first glance.

In the work Impossibility of a Pure Gaze, Krystyna Melnyk reflects that pure view of the male body is no longer possible. In this triptych, a young man's tender, unharmed flesh is adjacent to wounds that seem to dissolve into the material of the canvas. They remind of how political and historical contexts intrude into the sensual experience. The realization that the male body does not belong to itself during war and is extremely vulnerable ruins the perception of innocence, the illusion of full mutual ownership in love. But primarily, this is not about the reality of the physical body, but rather about a ‘deformed’ vision.

In the central work of the triptych, the artist attempts to heal the damaged gaze and to free the person from trauma inflicted by history. The materials chosen, wood and levkas (a special primer), which are traditional in icon painting, make the painting process longer, but also make the work more durable, granting it ‘the right to eternity’.

The side parts of the triptych embody the imprints of history that resemble shadows, spirits, clouds of smoke, and wounds. Ephemeral images elude unambiguous interpretation and therefore capture the complex impact of a traumatic past and war on memory and the mind. This is notably because of the semi-abstract images and the fragility of the fabric canvas, these scars become transient, and the violence disappears. The almost-sacred sensuality of the work and the space reveals a spirituality that finds the image of the divine and timeless awe in the fragility of the human body and soul.

In his project, Vasyl Tkachenko (Lyakh) combines painting and video to create the illusion of a surreal walk through personal memories. The artist immerses the viewer in a journey through his beloved places that remain inaccessible today due to the occupation of south of Ukraine.
The locations that form the backdrop for this journey show Mariupol and its surroundings - landscapes that played an important part in the author's life and to which he mentally returns again and again. However, the distance from these memories grows alongside the distance caused by time. Using video projection, Tkachenko introduces his figure into the space of the painting and the landscapes depicted in it, where his walk is accompanied by an audio recording of the artist's internal dialogue with the past. Contemplating loss and attempts to preserve the elusive, he immerses himself in reflections on how time, war, and occupation have changed familiar places.
Once-clear images gradually become blurred, turning into half-forgotten fragments or fantasies. The transformed landscapes become a stage for reflection on the constancy and immutability of natural motifs, which remain a strong connection to the past.

Yuriy Bolsa’s installation I Have Always Wanted to be Here creates an illusion of a homey, comfortable space, which is surreally transformed by the artist’s presence. Through three interconnected elements, he explores the possibility of changing his personality, gradually recreating each of the steps in an imaginary rebirth.
Bolsa explores vulnerable aspects of personality through his avatar, a bizarre character in a costume. A massive suit on a metal frame suggests that this is a defense mechanism, used to hide the wearer’s vulnerability behind a façade of aggression. The installation seems to invite the audience to take a seat at the table and start a conversation. The voice from the costume encourages conversation, shares predictions, compliments, or personal stories.
The second half of the costume is sitting on a swing — the legs, from which a new body of a future strong and kind personality is growing. The playground element recreates the untroubled joy of childhood and is complemented by a photo of a cat who lived in the artist’s village.
The final part of the transformation is a model of the artist's head, which seems to have just been pulled out of the water. This head, which has been forming under a black mask for a long time, has finally freed itself and is ready to join the newly formed body. Yuriy Bolsa creates a space where comfort is born from your willingness to hear and be heard. This is a place where you can seek support even in the most bizarre transformations.

The work Scream from a Bubble Bath refers to cult horror movies, which the artist uses as a tool for exploring her own psyche and, at the same time, the social order.
Horror films that Zhenia Stepanenko interprets vary in subgenres and themes. Body horrors reveal the existential fear of inevitable death and unwanted body transformations. Monster movies are a covert, often political and social, metaphor for anxiety about the normal order being destroyed by an invasion of parasitic organisms and bodies. Slashers focus on the odious character of murderers and rapists, but by revealing the traumatic lines of their childhood and past, they show their damaged human side. Psychological and fantasy horror movies, such as Hellraiser, Jacob’s Ladder, An American Werewolf in London, delve into the themes of the multi-layered, horrifying consequences of war, post-traumatic stress disorder, survivor’s trauma etc.
Scream from a Bubble Bath also focuses on the psychoanalytical potential of horror movies. Using porcelain, which is a rather exquisite, refined material, the artist symbolically elevates the genre of horror, typically viewed as low-brow. Stepanenko transforms eerie images into metaphorical, whimsical decorative elements designed to create an atmosphere of comfort and well-being. In this way, the conflict between content and form aligns with the role that horror movies play in the artist’s path toward self-discovery: horrors have become a comfortable, controlled way of encountering her own fears and the dark side of her personality. Interest in such extreme human manifestations as cruelty, violence, and madness, often taboo according to cultural and moral norms, is unleashed via horror movies. They provoke an uninhibited analysis of both personal and social issues, free from the oppression of sudden shock.

This installation Night Without Shadows and Light Without Rippling of Waves combines two video works: Tachyoness and Night. Thus, ​Lesia Vasylchenko compares the scales of historical temporalities, and the viewers, through their presence and observation, add a human temporal dimension, which connects the past and the future into a single moment.
The work Night recreates a century of Ukrainian night, combining video recordings of the night sky from 1918 to 2025. In this way, Vasylchenko transforms linearity into simultaneity: the video seemingly embodies one long night, with the entire century taking place at the same time, in a continuous flow. It depicts the night’s own eternal temporality, which is not reduced exclusively to the historical perspective and human existence. At the same time, it becomes a witness to many events in both the past and present. In particular, by using materials documenting blackouts and shelling, the work captures how the war turns night into a time of terror and fear. It comments on the generational nature of trauma, and its continuity through a century of history.
Night is a time for alternative stories. In contrast, daylight is associated with the discourse of the Enlightenment, which emphasizes rationality and evidence. Referring to the notion of ‘hauntology’ by Jacques Derrida, the artist emphasizes that the night erases established knowledge systems and conceals within itself all that is unwritten and undocumented, the hidden voices of those who have witnessed history but have not yet been heard and are waiting for the right moment. The night reveals a past that never fully disappears and constantly returns as a ghost of history, which affects the present and the future.
The title of the other video, Tachyoness, comes from the word ‘tachyon’, which means a hypothetical particle that travels faster than the speed of light. The work shows sunrises that occurred from 1990 to 2022, transforming 30 years of history into a single event. The video was created in collaboration with artificial intelligence, which studied hundreds of photographs collected by the artist from various sources and combined them into its own, machine-generated memory of dawn. The video references future prediction technologies, emphasizing the impact of artificial intelligence on the construction of memory. Tachyoness is 8 minutes long, which corresponds to the time it takes for sunlight to reach the Earth and the human eye.

Depicting nature in its most secret manifestations, Kateryna Aliinyk focuses on situations that provoke fear and tension. Viewers witness events that are usually hidden from the human eye. Wild boars, clouds of insects, or something rustling in tree roots — the scenes are so self-sufficient that they evoke a sense of spying, as if you are doing something inappropriate. The unpredictability of further developments increases the feeling of tension.
One of the central themes in the series is the ‘fragmentation’ of love, freedom, and death. War forms the suffocating backdrop, distorting the standard ideas of these notions, turning them into something fragile and twisted. The artist thus focuses her love, splintered into almost invisible manifestations, on the surrounding world, whose vulnerability is especially prominent now.
The canvas titled He Died of Old Age depicts a dead boar. This image embodies hope and restores the natural sequence of events, as an organic death becomes a privilege in the context of war. Other works in the series show how natural processes are cyclical. A seething cloud of insects, reminiscent of a biblical plague, becomes a harbinger of the Apocalypse. At the same time, the earth, filled with the movement of living beings, is shown not as an environment of the end, but as a place with its own turbulent existence.
The artist explores how fear, tension, and constant vigilance affect our perception of nature. In her landscapes, nature loses its idealized innocence, turning into a place of tension and anxiety instead. Through these paintings, Aliinyk reflects how war changes our ideas of love and beauty, turning even the most profound feelings into a source of stress. Creating landscapes that are both mesmerizing and frightening, the artist seeks a new way of finding love in a world where this feeling has become dangerous.