Ukraine at the Venice Biennale: International Acclaim Amid Cultural Destruction

The 61st Venice Biennale has unfolded amid protests, resignations and renewed debate over the politics of representation. But, for Ukrainian artists, such questions are not merely abstract. Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukrainian contemporary art exists in a contradictory position between international demand, forced exile and a genuine, ongoing struggle against cultural erasure.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has had contradictory effects on its contemporary art scene, upturning the lives of its artists while also gaining the support of international investment.

The Ukrainian art presented at this year’s Biennale reflects this predicament through directly addressing questions of freedom versus authoritarianism, or democracy versus oppression. For example, the Ukrainian Pavilion exhibition, titled Security Guarantees, showcases the work of acclaimed artist Zhanna Kadyrova. Featuring an evacuated public sculpture she made in 2019, titled The Origami Deer, it was originally created for a site in Donetsk Oblast where a dismantled Soviet nuclear-capable aircraft had sat.  The Pavilion’s title refers to the unfulfilled promises made by the US, the UK and the Russian Federation, for which Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in 1996.

A collateral exhibition staged by the internationally renowned, Kyiv-based PinchukArtCentre takes a different, but just as political, approach. Titled Still Joy – From Ukraine into the World, the show centres on the optimistic notion of joy as a radical tool of resistance. “It is difficult to speak about joy when the world is burning, but it can be a radical human act,” Björn Geldhof, the artistic director of the PinchukArtCentre, tells The Art Journal. “Ukraine is a unique provider of drones for many places. Maybe, too, we can be a unique provider of joy.”

Poignantly, the presentation’s starting points are testimonies gathered from former prisoners of war, soldiers and conflict reporters, yet it encompasses a wide range of work by both Ukrainian artists and international contributors. Alongside Ukrainian artists such as Nikita Kadan, Roman Khimei & Yarema Malashchuk and Kateryna Lysovenko, the show includes British artists Ryan Gander and Tacita Dean, as well as Gabrielle Goliath, who was supposed to be showing at the South Africa Pavilion, but was censured. This international scope situates Ukrainian contemporary art as part of a global conversation, as well as drawing parallels between the nation’s struggles and others worldwide. 

A video essay by Piotr Armianovski presents a poetic ode to the people of the now-destroyed city of Mariupol, now in Russian occupied territory. Filmed in 2017, the film is quietly prescient. Residents express fears for the port city’s future, as well as gratitude for the sea’s reassuring presence. Watching it is made distinctly uncomfortable by the knowledge that these dreams will never be realised; its former residents left without their homes.

A large installation by the Bangladeshi artist Ashfika Rahman similarly addresses displacement and forced exile. Rahman’s monumental, sun-like sphere comprises thousands of hanging temple bells, each one stamped with the fingerprint of a person indigenous to the highly contentious border between Bangladesh, India and Myanmar. In this contested zone where many are losing their homes through continued military interventions, the bells act as evidence – of existence, of land rights and of humanity.

The experience of exile is one of the exhibition’s defining undercurrents. It has also had a palpable effect on the Ukrainian artworld. While vernissage week is renowned for flooding the city with a Who’s Who of contemporary art, for many Ukrainian artists it is also a chance to reunite with colleagues that have left the country since 2022. “Like every industry in Ukraine, we’re battling scarcity,” Geldhof says. 

Many of the artists in Still Joy are also soldiers or marines. One of them, the cinematographer Yuri Gruzinov, staged an impromptu performance within the Russia Pavilion, during which he wrote the names of participants down in a red notebook while dressed in his Ukrainian military uniform. At Still Joy, he presents a film with his collaborator, Oleksiy Sai, created from the bodycam footage of Ukraine’s intelligence and reconnaissance experts working in enemy-controlled territories.

The PinchukArtCentre has built its reputation on its direct address of contentious political topics, a stance partly enabled by its privately owned status. Its owner, Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian billionaire, gives Geldhof’s team relative freedom to platform insurgent art. As early as 2015, the institution showed work such as Carlos Motta’s Patriots, Citizens, Lovers (2015), a video installation composed of interviews with Ukrainian LGBTQ+ activists, amid a nationwide culture of homophobic rhetoric. The importance of this expression cannot be understated. Ukraine has long valued untraditional testimonies as part of its cultural heritage, in the absence of Soviet-era records and archives. Now, as cultural sites are damaged and looted and significant cultural figures go missing, this kind of complex documentation is newly relevant.

International interest in Ukrainian art has risen exponentially since 2022, exemplified by major events such as the May 2022 Sotheby’s auction of 15 contemporary Ukrainian artists, or the Royal Academy’s major exhibition of Ukrainian modernism in 2024. Data also suggests a growing market: the prices of Ukrainian art sold by galleries and dealers increased on average by 1.5x from 2021 to 2023, according to a survey by Spilne Art and Saturday Team. In 2023, the volume of art sales through Ukrainian galleries and dealers rose by 32 percent.

Geldhof believes that the booming international market for Ukrainian art relies on both the wrong and right reasons. “The wrong reason is a logical interest in art made during conflict. The right reason is that a lot of artists have become undeniably great.” One of Still Joy’s Ukrainian artists, Kateryna Aliinyk, was at the start of her career when the full-scale invasion occurred. She had already lost her home due to the war in 2014, but says

that artists did not feel obligated to make work about the conflict until the full-scale invasion in 2022. “War has seeped into every sphere of life now,” she tells The Art Journal. Interest in her work – haunting, luminescent landscapes depicting the Ukrainian Donbas – grew exponentially following this period. She quickly began to work with Voloshyn Gallery in Warsaw and exhibited prolifically. “It is not a secret that even if war brought a lot of tragedy to Ukraine, it has also brought some positives,” she says.

Within Kyiv, contemporary art has also taken on a renewed relevance since the full-scale invasion. The PinchukArtCentre boasts the kind of visitor data which other western institutions can only dream of. Geldhof says that “every day we have between 1000 and 2000 visitors”, and – despite increased military enlistment since 2022 – the demographic remains particularly young. This has changed slightly over the past few years: “Our core

audience – young, mostly female, well educated – moved abroad at the outbreak of war,” Geldhof explains. “Today, we have an audience visiting the museum and discovering art for the first time.”

Despite this, Ukraine’s domestic art market is relatively undeveloped. Geldhof says that, “while there is a broad [Ukrainian] collector base interested in buying, there is no developed gallery circuit – the baseline of the market. You have an incredible audience of people who are hungry to buy art, but not the culture to facilitate it. I think that it’s an incredible market opportunity, but it is also a difficult one to step into.” He hopes that international momentum, whether motivated by genuine appreciation or market exploitation, will lead to the long-term development of a market domestically.

In the meantime, Ukrainian contemporary artists have much more to contend with than simply economic fluctuation. Alongside the everyday trials of survival in a conflict zone, it is a fight not to be overshadowed by the discourse surrounding Russia itself, or the transient attention span of the global media. Significantly, there are no Ukrainian artists in Koyo Kouoh’s group exhibition this year, nor were there in Adriano Pedrosa’s 2024 iteration. 

The Ukrainian art market sits in a complex space between booming international attention and the everyday realities of oppression, including the basic ability to survive. Its art, however, pays testament to the activist power of expression when more than economic value is at stake. Joy becomes a vehicle for liberation amid adverse circumstances: a celebration of their nation’s resilient spirit in the face of a distinctly inhuman war.