The Brooklyn Rail

With the Venice Biennale fast approaching, and with Russia’s war on Ukraine continuing unabated, it is worth looking at…Ukraine.

In curator Adriano Pedrosa’s 2024 Biennale exhibition “Foreigners Everywhere” there were no Ukrainian artists, nor artists from countries directly menaced by Russia. The worst war in Europe since World War II, which indeed has generated millions of refugees, namely “foreigners everywhere,” especially in Europe, was invisible.

I fear the same will be the case for this year’s exhibition “In Minor Keys,” curated by the late Koyo Kouoh and realized by her team, in which there are again no Ukrainians.

I wonder about this.

Ukraine, in the heart of Europe (and Venice is not all that far away) is fighting for its very survival. It is also on the frontlines of a rapidly escalating global conflict between autocracy and democracy, authoritarian control and freedom, and Ukrainian artists are responding with exceptionally relevant and consequential work. In my informed opinion, it is well worth paying attention to them, especially now, in these tumultuous times.

For my second extensive visit since Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, I attended numerous exhibitions and met with artists and curators whose lives and work have been profoundly affected by the war. It is one thing to make astute, adventurous, and meaningful art and exhibitions (which I experienced in droves) but quite another to do so during a traumatizing war.

A disclosure. Over the last four years, during which I have increasingly immersed myself in Ukrainian art (and Ukraine altogether), I have personally grown close with some of these artists and curators. Others I know only a little, or not at all. One artist, quite young, that I never met, died last April on the frontlines.

The responsibility they feel for their country, culture, and democracy is striking; intense civic engagement is in their DNA. Many are veterans of the 2013–2014 Revolution of Dignity, or Maidan Revolution, that ultimately helped oust the Russia-backed, obscenely corrupt, autocratic president Viktor Yanukovych. All are defending Ukraine through their art, exhibitions, donations, humanitarian efforts and, sometimes, military service.

All are clear-eyed about what is at stake. They understand that the war is not primarily about territory, as it is often framed in the West, but instead a colonial war meant to subjugate, brutalize, terrorize, and even erase Ukraine altogether, which Russia has been violently pursuing for hundreds of years. Russian president, ruthless dictator, and indicted war criminal Vladimir Putin has genocidally declared that Ukraine has no right to exist as a sovereign nation because it is Russian (he is laughably, historically, and linguistically wrong about this) and he is also continuing a centuries-old assault on Ukrainian culture because it is, well, Ukrainian.

This makes contemporary artists (who know their history) especially significant, as were their forebears who often faced vicious Russian oppression, including imprisonment and execution. They embody Ukraine’s vitality, contribute to and propel its living culture. They are dealing in freedom, critical thought, truthfulness, innovation, political challenge, and Ukrainian identity, which Putin, like Stalin before him and a great many other Russian leaders through the ages, seeks to crush. They are a threat. Their art is a weapon. When Russia temporarily occupied Kherson in 2022, the well-known artist, curator, and museum director Vyacheslav Mashnytskyi was immediately “disappeared.” Nothing has been heard from him since. Rising authoritarianism is also a grave threat elsewhere, including in the US. One can learn a lot from these Ukrainians. I certainly have.

My first stop was Lviv for the exhibition “The Stammering Circle” expertly curated by Marta Kuzma, an American from a Ukrainian family who was a major figure in the post-independence 1990s art scene in Ukraine. The exhibition was a signature component of Faktura 10, a year-long series of exhibitions, symposia, and performances, also headed by Kuzma, and supported by RIBBON International, a relatively new organization devoted to promoting art in the country by both Ukrainian and foreign artists. Most works were in the Jam Factory Art Center, an important venue that opened in 2023.

Ukrzaliznytsia, the beloved national railway (and how I got from Poland to Lviv), is a comfortable, efficient, relatively inexpensive, and essential marvel, transporting refugees, civilians, soldiers, and supplies throughout the vast country, including to the heavily attacked cities Kharkiv, Dnipro, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. It is a brilliant and valiant national railway. It is also a frequent target for Russia. As of this writing, Russia is increasingly attacking passenger trains with drones.

Julie Poly’s series of photographs “Ukrzaliznytsia” (2025) centers on the life and culture of these trains. There are photographs of sleeping people in their seats, train cars converted into mobile hospitals, diligent conductors, kids playing with their toys on the floor of a car. A young woman lying on her back, her button-festooned knapsack beside her, gazes calmly at the camera. She embodies the whole nation’s exhaustion and resolve. A woman and a man in fatigues, on their knees on the floor of a station, passionately embrace. One can only imagine what both soldiers might have gone through. The humanity in Poly’s photographs—love, tenderness, joy, consternation, sorrow, delight—contrasts so extremely with Russia’s inhuman war.

Putin has declared that Crimea is Russian, full stop. Many US politicians and journalists have lamentably, and lazily, agreed. In 1944, the Soviet Union, under Stalin, deported basically all the indigenous Crimean Tatars to Central Asia, and then sought to erase all traces of them and their heritage. Thousands perished during the deportation. Crimea’s complex, multicultural, and multi-civilizational history stretches back many centuries, long before Russia arrived on the scene, or even existed. Putin’s bogus “Russianness” was the pretext for invading and annexing Crimea, an important part of Ukraine, in 2014.

The Center for Spatial Technologies, a Ukrainian collective, begs to differ with Putin. Employing extensive research, maps, archival materials, historical photos and videos—all born of acute critical thought—their two-screen video installation Church, Chora, Chersonese (2025) explores how archaeology at ancient Chersonese (now Sevastopol) has long been conscripted and manipulated for ideological, military and imperialist purposes by Russia, asserting its specious spiritual and historical claim to Crimea, and also, for a short while, by Nazi Germany with its even more ridiculous claim. This installation dismantles Putin’s pseudo-historical justification for imperialist invasion: informed, engaging, intelligent art speaking truth to lie-spewing power.

During my initial visit in 2024, in a group exhibition at The Naked Room, an important Kyiv gallery, I first encountered works by the artist Kinder Album. Among them was an immediately enchanting yet then hard-hitting piece of what seemed folk art, a watercolor of a forest, river, and black and white dog, but also barrier tape and numbered evidence, including a missile cone, on the ground—a crime scene. This work highlights how forests, so central to Ukrainian history, culture, art, poetry, songs and folklore, have become prime sites for Russian war crimes. There are many mass graves, filled with the bodies of civilians, left by Russians in Ukrainian forests, notably in once occupied, then liberated Izium. Album’s matter-of-fact title says it all: “Ukrainian forests filled not only with mavkas and forest spirits, but also with material evidence of Russian war crimes” (2024). Mavka is a forest nymph from Ukrainian folklore.

This trip I met her in person in Lviv (her home city) for a wonderful studio visit during which we, I think, became friends. Her studio in the lush, semi-rural outskirts could be in Tuscany; war seems absurd there. Her burly, gregarious dog Shonik, took a special liking to me, and vice versa. It is preposterous that Shonek, thrusting his head into my knees, boldly demanding attention, should be subjected to war. Kinder Album’s eclectic work is impressive, spanning paintings, tapestries, drawings, and sculptures, including ceramics, while navigating between sexuality and war, playfulness and severity.

There were occasional air raid sirens while I was in Lviv, but nothing serious. I have grown used to them and often ignore them, as do many Ukrainians. Three days after I left for Kyiv, Russia attacked this historic city dating to the 13th century with its impressive architecture, gorgeous cathedrals, cobblestone streets, downtown performers drawing throngs, busy bars and restaurants, and robust civic and economic life. One civilian was killed and many more were injured.

I immediately contacted Kinder Album on Instagram. This is how she responded,

Hello dear! Yes I am alive but it was again near me where missile it. We were in bomb shelter with my son but heard as missile flew over the house.

I took the train from Lviv to Kyiv, a six-hour trip, rolling through the expansive, fertile and farmed countryside. Ukraine, with its nutritive chernozem (black soil), is often called the breadbasket of the world. In 1932–1933 the Soviet Union, under Stalin, engineered a mass famine—the Holodomor—that killed approximately four million Ukrainians (and possibly many more). Current Russian atrocities are nothing new.

My train arrived on time at 9:40 pm. Lesia Khomenko met me at the station for a personal preview—the official opening would be two days later—of her monumental, 69’ x 39’ acrylic on polyvinyl chloride fabric painting in the main train station (Motion, 2025), on which she was putting the finishing touches (the station gave her a ballroom-sized room to use as her studio.) This unorthodox painting as public art is in one of the most prominent, frequented, and iconic buildings in all of Ukraine, which is, of course, a prime target for Russa. It was commissioned by Ukrzaliznytsia (which has supported several excellent art projects) and the PinchukArtCentre, where she also had a major, early mid-career retrospective (more on this in a bit).

Melding abstraction, representation, and figuration, her motion-filled, multihued painting features a cross section of Ukrainians riding an escalator and it is installed in front of the station’s actual escalator used by thousands of people every day. Among the figures are a soldier, young girl and her mother, railway worker, armless veteran, and barista (a great touch; Kyiv is obsessed with excellent coffee). These are people that Khomenko met and gathered for a group photo.

The escalator motif resonates. This cluster of Ukrainians is a microcosm of the whole country in motion, modernizing amid horrific war, developing its democracy, culture, industries, economy, and nationhood after centuries of Russian oppression, and now fiercely resisting Russia again. Khomenko’s innovative painting is huge, but doesn’t feel imposing, more like welcoming. Along with brushes and paint, she utilized a broom to paint and a drone with a camera (getting special permission to do so indoors) to see, adjust, and complete far-off parts. It quickly became a cathartic and beloved public artwork. It embodies the energy, precarity, hopefulness, suffering, and resilience of Ukrainians. Its stay has recently been extended, perhaps for a long time.

When Khomenko and I left the station, for me to get to my hotel before the midnight curfew, there was a line of ambulances outside, lights flashing. A train had arrived, she told me, transporting wounded and, likely, deceased soldiers.

Such trains are constantly arriving.

Zhanna Kadyrova is among the most acclaimed contemporary Ukrainian artists; she will represent her country in the upcoming Venice Biennale.

I experienced her installation Refugees (2022-ongoing) in the exhibition Art after 2000. Glossary at Ukrainian House, a major venue for contemporary art in Kyiv and formerly, in Soviet times, the Lenin Museum. I also met with two of the four curators, Tatiana Kochubinska and ⁠Kateryna Tsyhykalo, for an enlightening walk-through of their excellent, creatively conceived and installed, exhibition of post-2000s Ukrainian art.

Kadyrova’s installation featured living plants, light box photographs of partially destroyed buildings, a video, and flowers. She rescued the plants from public infrastructure, including schools, libraries, and hospitals, that Russia attacked, which it constantly does, each attack a war crime, while constantly denying that it does so. In 2024, shortly after I departed Kyiv, Russia deliberately targeted the largest children’s hospital in Ukraine which has many pediatric cancer patients. That attack was just a few blocks from my hotel.

There is a familiar chant at pro-Ukraine rallies in New York: “Russia is a terrorist state.”

I emphatically agree.

Things just don’t get more depraved and terroristic than targeting children with cancer, also doctors and nurses, in a hospital.

Kadyrova’s vivid, colorful photographs are of wrecked institutions strewn with debris, and with surviving plants scattered about. The video (with no translation) was nevertheless heart-wrenching for me, a tearful woman talking about her experiences while tenderly stroking the long leaf of a plant. Coupling photographs of plants with actual ones is profoundly touching and illuminating. Russia’s horrid war harms everything—people, plants, animals, infrastructure, the environment. Kadyrova treats these rescued plants with care and respect, as refugees should be treated; they have been through a lot. She gives them shelter and sustenance and they travel with her internationally. She facilitates their post-horror lives…via art.

In the same exhibition were elegant and sensitive, yet also rough and willfully scruffy drawings, each with a brownish-russet tint, by Marharyta (or Margarita, as her first name is sometimes spelled) Polovinko, including one in which a loosely outlined figure (a child, maybe an angel, maybe a spirit) ascends off the ground among scraggly trees which seem damaged, perhaps by war, perhaps pollution (Untitled, 2024). Hushed, somber viewers gathered around these drawings.

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion, Polovinko began using her own blood as an art material, which links her work to trauma, panic and war and, because human blood is rich in iron, to her heavily industrial and polluted home city of Kryvyi Rih, long known for iron ore and mining. Trees figure prominently in her art. They are at once lovely and foreboding.

Polovinko enlisted in 2024 and was serving as a combat medic. In early April 2025 she perished on the frontlines, 31-years old, a “true warrior” according to her battalion’s Instagram post, who died “with honor and weapon in hand.”

In the exhibition “Tastes Like the Sea,” curated by Ivanna Kozachenko, the artist-run gallery thesteinstudio exhibited one oil on paper painting by Polovinko from her student days (Citizens of Kryvyi Rih in Front of the Overnight Stay House, 2019). The gallery also served as a communal site for people to gather and honor Polovinko, to share their memories and emotions. Rendered in rapid and energetic brushstrokes mixed with finely tuned ones, Polovinko’s painting is both raw and exquisite. It is chock full of deep feeling. It is a force. Five young people huddle outdoors in a park lined with trees. Smoking, sullen, and anxious, with averted gazes, they seem palpably vulnerable, weighed down by cares, out of sorts with their world, except for one woman in the middle, emanating intensity, with blue tints above her eyes and, perhaps, a slight smile, as she directly faces the viewer. This riveting group portrait is strikingly prescient. Kryvyi Rih, in part because it is Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s hometown, is now frequently attacked by Russia, resulting in numerous deaths and injuries.

Polovinko was just at the beginning of what would likely have been a distinguished and influential career.

The art being made in wartime Ukraine is important and consequential. But an ongoing tragedy is all the important and consequential art that will never be made.

I had studio visits with leading artists, including Kateryna Aliinyk, from Luhansk, who fled from her temporarily, and brutally, occupied home and whose gorgeous yet unnerving paintings are of remembered, imagined, and lost (to her) landscapes gravely damaged by war and ecocide. We talked of her art but even more of her painful experience of being an IDP (internally displaced person) in her own country; of her profound, and now severed, connection with nature in Luhansk, starting when she was a young child, and how her art has helped her cope with trauma. I met with Nikita Kadan, long one of Ukraine’s most prominent artists, who has made many works in various mediums concerning the war, Ukrainian history, and the legacy of Soviet power and aesthetics. His studio surprised me. It is high up in a Kyiv high rise. He can literally see and hear the war from where he works—Russian drones and missiles, Ukrainian antiaircraft, explosions.

I was in New York on September 11, 2001, when Islamic terrorists attacked the World Trade Centers. So much of the country (and world) was shocked and appalled and the so-called War on Terrorism quickly ensued.

Ukraine is experiencing such aerial terrorism daily and nightly.

The terrorists are Russians.

I was in Lviv when Trump rolled out the red carpet to welcome the chief terrorist, Putin, to Alaska. For me, this was sickening.

Last year, I met with tech-savvy artists who were not making art per se in their studio but instead advanced drones for the military, and I needed special permission to do so, basically to be seriously vouched for. I improvisationally termed what they were producing “radical kinetic sculptures,” which, I’m told, they liked. This trip I met them again, with pleasure and respect. Their new (secret, for obvious reasons) studio is much bigger, their numbers too, their output more robust. The war grinds on and on.

The PinchukArtCentre is one of the most important venues for contemporary art in Kyiv, and in all of Ukraine, with an ambitious program helmed by Artistic Director Björn Geldhof. Six major exhibitions were slated to open simultaneously on a Saturday. That is ambitious under any conditions, but especially during this war with all its hardships and disruptions, blackouts and attacks.

Many people in Kyiv told me I was lucky because the capital city had been “quiet” for some time and I immediately knew just what they meant.

But then, it wasn’t.

Two nights before the openings, Russia bombarded Kyiv with hundreds of missiles and drones. I woke to explosions that lasted for hours. A missile struck a five-story apartment building in the eastern Darnytskyi district killing over twenty people, including children, and wounding many more A shopping mall, diplomatic buildings of the European Union and British Council, the Kyiv Institute of Automation (a Soviet-era building that has been converted into artist studios, and where I’ve had several studio visits), and many other sites throughout the city were struck, including those close to me.

That was a long night, a harrowing one. It is one thing to read about such an attack or see video excerpts, but quite another to experience, hear, and feel it, also to understand (as I viscerally did that night) that it was not just Russia, or Putin, but Russians—actual people—who were doing this. Actual Russians were choosing to become terrorists and mass murderers, including targeting an apartment building full of sleeping people in the middle of the night.

There are many, many Russian mass murderers and many Russians rooting for them.

In the morning, bustling Kyiv was back to normal, with flowing traffic, people on the sidewalks headed to work, open shops, crowded subways, and rescue workers at the targeted sites. Ukrainian resilience is breathtaking. The tremendous farm to table restaurant a block from my hotel (shout out to Zavertaylo Bilya Sofiyi) was busy with breakfasters; the usual lines were at the coffee stands (such stands are ubiquitous). Normal, daily life is a potent form of resistance. This big, varied, lively, and inviting European city was back to its routines, this splendid city that is constantly assaulted by its barbarous neighbor.

Back in New York, many people have asked me if I was scared to be in Ukraine. That morning, despite the overnight terror, I felt grateful.

The exhibitions opened on time. There is not the space for me to adequately these shows. Suffice it to say there were all thoroughly engaging. In their solo exhibition, the Open Group (Ukrainian artists Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga) exhibited their remarkable and powerful video installation Repeat After Me II (2022–2024) in which Ukrainian refugees vocalize the sounds of the Russian weapons that attacked and terrorized them while viewers are encouraged to join in karaoke style, through microphones. This work, previously exhibited to much acclaim in the Polish Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale and elsewhere, including 601 Artspace in New York and the High Line, had special resonance in Kyiv, following the Russian attacks two nights before.

Lesia Khomenko’s retrospective avoided a chronological approach and instead thoughtfully juxtaposed paintings from different stages of her career, highlighting connections between them. It explored how she combines a conceptual approach involving extensive research, carefully developed and honed ideas, and social and political engagement, including alertness to a changing Ukraine, with complex and innovative formal, visual, very painterly concerns, including composition, color, how to render figures, and, and the behavior and application of paint.

The large paintings in Khomenko’s Stepan Repin (2009–2011) series are based on her grandfather’s memories of his experiences as a soldier in the Soviet army in World War II. Khomenko evokes and subverts the Socialist Realist aesthetics and ideology to which she was subjected in her youth, for instance her painting not of a heroic soldier on the march but a vulnerable one, his hands covering his ears, cowering in a trench.

Her remarkable and, to my mind, unprecedented paintings of the past few years incorporate new technological ways of seeing, recording, understanding and responding to war, including battlefield drone and smart phone videos shared on social media and websites. With fiery, orange explosions; blue and pink streaks; and jutting gray, geometric, metallic forms (among others) Khomenko’s turned just a few seconds of a video taken by a Russian sailor when his ship was attacked by a Ukrainian drone into a reeling, tour-de-force, partly abstract and partly representational painting (Sea Battle, 2025).

The wonderful small portraits, resembling painted snapshots, in her “Superstars” (2005) series are of her vibrant, young friends, some of whom (including Kadyrova and Kadan) went on to become major artists. They evince the dynamism and optimism, joy and freedom of youth in post-Soviet Ukraine. Years later, the portraits in her “Max in the Army” (2022) series are of men in military poses but wearing civilian clothes. These men enlisted after the full-scale invasion. One painting from the series was included, a life-size portrait of her then partner, the artist Max Robotov. Khomenko captures his abrupt, previously unimagined transition from civilian to soldier in a country abruptly confronted with war.

Starting early and lasting late, there were abundant visitors and I noticed how avid for, and engaged with, the artworks most of them were—patiently scrutinizing, studying, reading, learning, absorbing. Two nights before, Russians, as is usual, came to destroy. Artists do just the opposite: they create. This was a day (and there are many such days in Ukraine) when creative art really mattered—visually, ideationally, emotionally, and as a nutritive force.