“Russia’s idea is to eliminate Ukraine – and to eliminate Ukrainian culture. If it has no culture, Ukraine does not exist.”
That was the sentiment that compelled Pavlo Makov, the official Ukrainian artist at the 59th Venice Biennale, to head to Italy to install his exhibition.
Makov and his team, including the curator Maria Lanko, were determined, said Pavlov, “to show that we are here, and we exist. I am not quoting Churchill directly, but he talked about the things that we are fighting for – and we are fighting for our culture, our way of seeing the world.”
Makov’s work is called Fountain of Exhaustion – a pyramid of 78 bronze funnels set in tiers, through which water flows. The original idea came in 1995, when, owing to serious floods, the city of Kharkiv lost its water supply for several weeks.
When the invasion began on 24 February, Lanko took to her car, with the bronze funnels in her boot. Six days later – the highways having been shelled and the back roads jammed – she made it to the border. In Milan, she found a fabricator who could recreate the parts of the artwork that she hadn’t been able to take with her.
Makov described how he and his family had initially been reluctant to leave Kharkiv, despite a terrifying period in February when “life was like a pendulum swinging first this way then that – will the war start? Yes, or no.”
After a week sleeping in a bomb shelter beneath Kharkiv University’s arts centre, he, his wife, some close friends and his mother (and their cats) took to the road. Having got his mother safely installed in Vienna, he set off for Venice. “I felt I’m not so much an artist, or an individual, so much as a citizen of Ukraine. I felt that Ukraine has to be represented,” he said.
The team is also organising the Piazza Ucraina – a temporary pavilion in the Biennale’s main venue, the Giardini, which will host talks “focused”, said Lanko, “on decolonising Ukraine from Russia and giving importance to Ukrainian culture”.
In the meantime, the writer and artist Yevgenia Belorusets spent the first 40 days of the war sleeping (or rather, not sleeping) in a corridor in her Kyiv home, as far as possible from any potential breaking glass, “with my computer and hard drive, a charged phone, a passport and documents by my side”.
Her diary of the war, accompanied by her simple photographs, is to be shown at This is Ukraine, an official collateral exhibition of the Venice Biennale. The show’s venue, the spectacular Scuola Grande della Misericordia, is adorned with blue and yellow banners emblazoned with the words “We are defending our freedom” in the handwriting of the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The exhibition is funded by the Ukrainian oligarch and arts donor, Victor Pinchuk.
The Russians, by contrast, are conspicuously absent. Their national pavilion in one of the Biennale’s main venues, the Giardini, stands empty after its team resigned. On Tuesday, an armed guard was patrolling the building, the property of the Russian state. Absent, too, is Roman Abramovich’s 377ft yacht, a regular sight in previous years.
Aside from Belorusets’ diary, This is Ukraine includes Lesia Khomenko’s huge paintings of ordinary men transformed from their usual lives – chemist, say, or IT consultant – into soldiers. Nikita Kadan’s installations use fragments of twisted, ruined metal he gathered both from the conflict in Donbas in 2014 and from the streets in the current war.
One wall is covered with more than 300 photographs of mothers of men who lost their lives in the 2014 war. Damien Hirst has contributed a blue and yellow butterfly painting.
“The cultural front is also a front,” said Björn Geldhof, the director of Pinchuk Art Centre in Kyiv. “There are soldiers defending our freedom every day. We are not all soldiers but we all have a task and a mission.”
Pinchuk made his fortune in steel pipes in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He is the son-in-law of the country’s second post-Soviet president, Leonid Kuchma, whose regime was repeatedly accused of corruption. This is Ukraine this year takes the place of the Future Generation art prize, which Pinchuk’s foundation has staged biannually in Venice since 2010.
