The Brooklyn Rail

Helmed by artistic director and chief curator Marta Kuzma, Faktura 10 is a multi-site, multimodal experiment across borders and time. Participants from Ukraine, Lebanon, Japan, and elsewhere respond directly to Russia’s full-scale invasion, and other atrocities, in a series of ten events (hence the title) staged throughout 2025, in New York, Kyiv, and Lviv as part of Faktura 10—a core initiative of RIBBON International, a nonprofit that supports historic and contemporary Ukrainian arts and culture. “Artists in Ukraine today are asking themselves,” Kuzma told me, months after Faktura 10 launched, “where should we put our efforts? Is it going to be creating art, or working to provide support and evidence of possible war crimes?”

Faktura 10 was inspired by the antagonisms Theodor Adorno explored in Aesthetic Theory (1970) which posited “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” What constitutes art in times of conflict? Where might we find precedent in art history to grapple with the devastation? Kuzma, a tenured faculty member and former dean of the Yale School of Art, notes she took cues from the Bauhaus’s semester plan and Black Mountain College in how she arrived at the peripatetic curatorial approach. “The exiles at Black Mountain College were breaking categories, because you could no longer define art as such,” she said. “How can we think again? How can we even fathom art in the aftermath of what has happened?”

Kuzma served as founding director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art’s Ukrainian branch in Kyiv from 1990 through 2000. I met her in 2022, when we co-organized a symposium at Yale University, University College London, and the Lviv Center for Urban History about reconstruction in Ukraine. Flash forward, for Faktura 10, Kuzma has co-organized a panel discussion at the Judd Foundation in New York; photography exhibitions by Yana Kononova and Julie Poly; a theater workshop by Richard Maxwell at Kyiv’s Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theatre; a film installation by Center for Spatial Technologies in Lviv; philosophy lectures by Dr. Peter Osborne; and a Kira Muratova film retrospective at the Lincoln Center.

“I remember in the nineties when I met Kira [Muratova] in Ukraine. I felt like, ‘Oh, I have to do something with her.’ She was always at art events,” Kuzma recounted. She continued:

I had just organized Boris Mikhailov’s first retrospective, in 1996. I had wanted to follow that up with Kira’s retrospective, but years passed, and everything changed. I always had been so sad about the fact I hadn’t worked with her when she was alive. I always felt she was like Agnès Varda, or Chantal Akerman, someone who was really outside of the box, even in filmmaking, addressing what life was like psychoanalytically, but not someone trained medically or scientifically.

After attending the Judd Foundation panel last March, I’ve watched Faktura 10 unfold from afar, through social media, and exchanges with Daria Anosova, a Faktura 10 curatorial research associate. I remember staring in awe at photography Daria shared of Untitled, 1997/2025, featuring Orthodox and Catholic church bells made between 1688 and 1925, on loan from the Museum of the Bells in Lutsk, Ukraine and Kyiv’s St. Sophia Cathedral. Untitled, 1997/2025 replicates an installation Kuzma co-curated in 1997 with Jannis Kounellis—a Greek artist that survived World War II and later the Greek Civil War—and reconstructed at the Old Academic Building of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, together with ФОРМА, a Kyiv architecture firm, and others.

Taking inspiration from Italian art historian Germano Celant and Ukrainian painter David Burliuk, an artist credited with reviving the term “facture,” the church bells in Untitled, 1997/2025 were hung from I-beams made of steel that run through the Baroque building’s apse. The combination of steel beams, quintessential facets of mass production, together with church bells, symbols of hand craftsmanship, elicits a harrowing effect whether observing the piece in person or through photography—an assemblage of the sacred and profane. Curators say that the artwork “stands as a gesture toward the autonomy of art and life.”

At Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theatre, in Kyiv, Richard Maxwell’s new play, Galicia, features an all-Ukrainian cast, and has set design by ФОРМА. The cast members include: Kseniya Boychenko, Oksana Briukhovetska, Nataliia Khodos, Bohdana-Valeriia Korniienko, Anke Cristodorescu, Dmytro Krashchenko, Alina Lianyha, Khilyal Tiufekchioglu, Yevheniia Nesterova, and Oksana Saboldash. Galicia revisits Spanish Civil War photographer Robert Capa, the collective nom de plume of Gerda Taro, André Friedmann, and David Seymour. The production reminds us of Taro’s 1937 death on the battlefield, similar to the more recent killing of Antoni Lallican, a French photographer murdered in the Donbas region by a Russian drone strike. Over twenty journalists have been killed in Ukraine since 2022 and in Gaza, since 2023, more than 240 journalists have been killed.

The Stammering Circle in Lviv is larger than some art biennials, but it’s just a fraction of Faktura 10. The group show is one facet of Faktura 10 and features works by: Mikhailov, Kononova, Poly, Oleksiy Radynski, Moyra Davey, Trisha Donnelly, R. H. Quaytman, Charlotte Posenenske, Nobuyoshi Araki, Walid Raad, Clarice Lispector, Noel Nutels, Frederick Kiesler, Francisco Goya, and Gregori Warchavchik, a Jewish-Brazilian architect born in Odessa. The Stammering Circle mounts Kiesler’s manuscript for Magic Architecture, a manifesto about housing by the architect who penned Correalist Manifesto in 1938, following Yvan Goll and André Breton’s Surrealist manifestos (both 1924). “What really influenced me was Paul Celan, and how, primarily metaphorically, he looked at the Bukovina region as a place, a meridian,” Kuzma said, in describing The Stammering Circle. “It’s not a static place of identity. It’s unstatic, unsteady. That seemed to me like a beautiful point to venture into.”

Celan and Kiesler were both born in Czernowitz, a city in the Bukovinian region on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire in what is now southwestern Ukraine. Combinatorially, works by Celan, Kiesler, and others on view at The Stammering Circle speak to self-preservation under fascism, and the art that comes from it. “Kiesler’s Magic Architecture is this almost Vitruvian study of architecture that was never finished and published,” said Gerd Zillner, Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation director, who attended The Stammering Circle in person.

“They were facing the threat of nuclear destruction in the Atomic Age. Without any notice, you could be extinct. This led Kiesler to think about architecture and building differently,” Zillner added. “His approach was informed by this ‘fear of the unseen,’ which is how he phrased it. We can think about this in relation to the permanent threats of drones that are today part of modern warfare. This paradigm makes Kiesler very, very relevant for the here and now, where strikes can come from above without any notice in advance.”

Zillner pointed to artists he met at The Stammering Circle like Janina Pedan and Katya Kopeikina as harbingers of where Ukrainian art is headed. “Many Ukrainian artists have a strong interest in ornament, and national identity,” he continued, “things that were suppressed first by the Soviets and now the Russians.” Ultimately, Faktura 10 sets a precedent for curatorship in wartime, a destabilizing condition that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon, denoting one of the most ambitious curatorial projects in recent memory.