LVIV — The town of Lviv has been a hub for Ukrainians fleeing Russian assaults and brutality since 2014, serving as a house to humanitarian initiatives like Superhumans and Unbroken that present rehabilitation, assist, in depth remedy, and prosthetics for struggle victims. Although it has not suffered almost the quantity and depth of Russian assaults as have areas additional east, it’s removed from proof against the present struggle. The storied, cathedral-rich metropolis relationship to the thirteenth century is topic to aerial assaults, together with a latest one which killed one civilian and injured many extra on August 21, shortly after I departed.
I used to be there to go to The Stammering Circle, a signature element of Faktura 10, a year-long collection of exhibitions, artwork initiatives, live shows, performances, movies, and symposia principally in Ukraine (two occasions have been in New York). Faktura 10 Chief Curator and Director Marta Kuzma, an American from a Ukrainian immigrant household, was a vital determine within the post-independence Nineties Ukrainian artwork scene. Now she’s come dwelling, so to talk. The title of the exhibition, which is on view at Jam Manufacturing unit Artwork Middle and two different venues, references the Romanian-Jewish poet, author, translator, and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan (born in what’s now Chernivtsi in Ukraine) — particularly his efforts to trend a language and artwork in his mom tongue, German, with the power to outlive and flourish amid trauma and struggle.
Julie Poly, Ukrzaliznytsia (2025), framed coloration {photograph} mounted on aluminum and coloration pictures
Surprisingly, few artworks within the exhibition straight tackle the present struggle, and lots of have been made years in the past, generally removed from Ukraine. Nonetheless, all achieve this obliquely, whereas situating artmaking in a context of struggle, resistance, resilience, and basic humanity.
In his 2011–12 collection Buildings of Insanity, Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov captures rugged rock formations, caves, and mountainous surfaces. Geological markings trace at human, energetic, typically erotic, generally fantastical figures, which the artist’s adjoining drawings make clear — conflations of nature and people. Mikhailov is from Kharkiv, now attacked day by day and nightly by Russia. For me, his collection assumes startling new connotations throughout wartime, together with the fierce attachment of a individuals to their land.
The silhouette and drawn figures in Mikhailov’s work join with these in American artist R.H. Quaytman’s close by modern work from her 2021 collection Fashionable Topics, Chapter Zero, primarily based partially on artworks regarding urgent social points by Nineteenth-century Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz. An upended, headless physique; a solitary, small orphan; a suicide with a pistol — these resonate in modern Ukraine.
Yana Kononova, Incendiary Lands (2025), black-and-white print from adverse (photograph Gregory Volk/Hyperallergic)
Yana Kononova’s large-scale, black and white pictures, without delay voluptuous and foreboding, are of mud volcanoes and rocky terrain in oil-producing Azerbaijan, previously a part of the Soviet Union. They’re coupled with “Incendiary Lands” (2025), comprising reprints of archival images in a vitrine exhibiting derricks and infrastructure from the late Nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Russians have been central to the event of the petroleum trade in Azerbaijan. Now, oil and gasoline gasoline the Russian financial system and struggle machine: Oil income equal loss of life for Ukrainians. Many international locations want to unbiased Azerbaijan as a alternative for Russian petroleum. Kononova was born on the Azerbaijani island of Pirallahi and emigrated together with her household to Ukraine through the First Nagorno-Karabakh Struggle from 1988 to ’94 (a part of the nation’s ongoing assaults on Armenian communities and cultural heritage). She is now residing by means of one other struggle. Juxtaposing geological and human time, her primeval landscapes hyperlink fossil fuels with world warming and struggle.
Conceptual, visible, and materials correspondences course by means of this sensitively curated exhibition. A single, distinguished sunflower in Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki’s avenue scene “Tokyo Fine Day” (1993/2025), one in every of a number of pictures from early in his profession within the exhibition, is particularly apt right here: The sunflower is an emblem of Ukraine. Lebanese artist Walid Raad’s vibrant inkjet prints are geometric abstractions that additionally resemble flowers, together with sunflowers in some circumstances, as within the collection Appendix 153, a part of The Atlas Group (1989–2004) which archived imagined tales and artifacts of the Lebanese Civil Struggle.
Walid Raad in collaboration with The Atlas Group, 1989–2004, Appendix 153 (2019), framed pigmented inkjet print
Raad’s accompanying fictional story signifies that these prints are pictures that the apocryphal Palestinian artist Suha Traboulsi took within the late Nineteen Fifties of her personal work. He writes that whereas “many Arab art historians” perceived her work as forerunners of Op-Artwork, they have been as an alternative primarily based on shell explosions through the ’70s in war-stricken Beirut. A small {photograph} of an explosion is hooked up to every print. Raad’s story, sly and fanciful but vaguely believable, is indelible. He has discovered a novel manner of transmuting struggle into magnificence, terror into artwork, with out sanitizing its brutality.
Elsewhere, Ukrainian artist Julie Poly’s 2025 pictures discover the lifetime of Ukrzaliznytsia, the extremely environment friendly and hospitable nationwide rail system that offers the collection its title. She seize scenes of on a regular basis life: a feminine soldier in fatigues curled up and asleep in a sleeper automotive subsequent to her black canine, a smiling lady with a number of fluffy canine and quite a few trophies; a shirtless, tattooed soldier along with his head bowed as if deep in thought or prayer; youngsters with their toys, a practice automotive reworked right into a makeshift hospital, diligent conductors at work. There may be such humanity in these photographs — pleasure, love, sorrow, endurance, tenderness — that contrasts so extraordinarily with Russia’s inhumane struggle. A younger lady mendacity on her again calmly gazes on the digicam. She embodies the entire nation’s exhaustion and resolve.
Julie Poly, Ukrzaliznytsia (2025), framed coloration {photograph} mounted on aluminum and coloration pictures
Whereas Vladimir Putin seeks to disclaim and remove Ukrainian identification altogether, a collaborative set up by set designer Janina Pedan and artist Anna-Mariia Kucherenko on the Dim 42 artwork area options uniquely Ukrainian symbols, indicators, and ornaments relationship again centuries. On the Jam Manufacturing unit, a movie by Moyra Davey focuses on 4 diasporic artists: Paul Celan; Peter Hujar, who was raised by his Ukrainian grandparents; Kyiv-born filmmaker Maya Deren, whose household fled to flee anti-Jewish pogroms within the Nineteen Twenties; and Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, whose household additionally fled Western Ukraine through the pogroms.
Ukrainian filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski, collaborating with researcher Philipp Goll, has turned lately unearthed movie footage taken by a gaggle of Ukrainian filmmakers in Siberia within the Nineteen Eighties into a rare single-channel video, a travelogue of types titled “Where Russia Ends” (2024). Narrated by filmmaker Lyuba Knorozok, it exposes the brutality, greed, and racism underpinning the subjugation and exploitation of Indigenous peoples (notably Buryats) underneath the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union, accompanied by huge environmental harm. Left implicit is that Putin’s so-called “special military operation,” which additionally impacts Indigenous communities at dwelling, is extra of the identical; one more Russian colonial struggle with devastating penalties, together with ecocide.
Davey’s entrancing video “Four [чотири]” (2025), commissioned particularly for this exhibition, combines scenes of various individuals enjoying, dancing, communing, and exercising in Manhattan’s Riverside Park with the recitation of a wonderful textual content concerning the artists, learn by Davey in English and Knorozok in Ukrainian. The New York scenes embrace symbols of Ukrainian tradition — hair, dancing, flowers, and music amongst them. Close to this deeply touching video hold two absurdist but ominous 1815–17 etchings by Francisco Goya with cavorting figures, girls in a single, males within the different. The Spanish artist was himself steeped in struggle and brings historic gravity to this superlative present, whose pangs and desires nonetheless resonate along with his personal two centuries later.
Francisco Goya, “Disparate femenino” (1815–17) (left) and “Modo de Volar” (1815–16) (proper), etching, aquatint, and drypoint on laid paper
Set up view of The Stammering Circle on the Jam Manufacturing unit Artwork Middle, with Nobuyoshi Araki’s “Tokyo Fine Day” (1993/2025) within the background and Boris Mikhailov’s Collection of 4 (1982–83/2025), print of contact sheet, within the foreground
The Stammering Circle continues at a number of venues throughout Lviv, Ukraine, by means of November 2. The exhibition was curated by Marta Kuzma.
