Still Joy \u2013 from Ukraine into the World
PinchukArtCentre & Victor Pinchuk Foundation
Palazzo Contarini-Polignac
May 9\u2013August 8, 2026
Venice<\/p>\n
Official. Unofficial. Belarus.
Belarus Free Theatre
Church of San Giovanni Evangelista
May 9\u2013November 22, 2026
Venice<\/p>\n
The postulate to separate art from politics has often been voiced in the context of the 2026 Venice Biennial as a result of globally heard protests against the participation of Russia and Israel. Even some curators and writers seem to have forgotten that most art is inherently political and that the Venice Biennale was designed as a soft power tool of national states\u2014like the Olympic Games and world\u2019s fairs. In its 131-year long history, many artists tried to outsmart the commissioning bodies, while states used their efforts to present themselves as more liberal. The relationship between art and state is the core of the Venice Biennale. That\u2019s why it is such an important stage for nations without states, unrecognized states, and those under war or occupation.<\/p>\n
Both protests attracted more immediate attention than the exhibitions of artists from Ukraine and Gaza. Rather than comparing geopolitical apples and oranges, it is more apt to read the Ukrainian exhibition organized by the PinchukArtCentre in the context of the first independent exhibition of Belarusian art at the Venice Biennale organized by the Belarus Free Theatre from London (both official collateral events of the 2026 Biennale).<\/p>\n
Ukrainians masterminded an important weapon: their narrative. Still Joy \u2013 from Ukraine into the World, featuring works by fourteen Ukrainian and ten international artists, tells a clear story. And its joy is infectious. Above all, it is a thought-provoking exhibition that makes great use of the beautiful Palazzo Contarini Polignac. In the fifth year of the full-scale war and the twelfth since Russia annexed the Crimea, Ukraine still stands. Its people live a reality of alarms, shellings, excruciating cold in winter, civilian deaths, family separation, children kidnapping, seeing no end to the war. Ukraine lost some 350 of its artists\u2014three times as many as the number of artists shown in the Biennale exhibition. How does one live under circumstances like these, when it becomes clear that normal life or happiness cannot be postponed and lived sometime later? How does one live in the moment? The exhibition shows that each manifestation of life becomes an act of war.<\/p>\n
Two large screens in the entranceway show two massive crowds partying at music concerts, one in 2019\u2014when the war in Donbas wasn\u2019t news anymore and the sense of greater danger was fading, and one in 2023\u2014a year into the full-scale war, when partying became both resistance and a celebration of life. In Dedicated to the Youth of the World II and III (2019 and 2023 respectively), the camera of Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei shows the hypnotic trance of the packed crowd, the frenzy of the music, lights, and bodies, to then follow the participants into their daily lives.<\/p>\n
An installation by Zhanna Kadyrova features plants she saved from bombed apartments and large-scale lightboxes with their photographs taken among rubble. While Kadyrova\u2019s uncanny ability to play with materials that encode Ukrainian post-Soviet architectural landscape, like concrete and mosaic, were considered her hallmark, something else is at the core of her war works: she is busy saving and moving. There is a Sisyphean effort in her moving stones from the river, transporting them, and transforming into bread (Palianytsia [2022]); there is utopian care in saving her concrete sculpture Origami Deer (2019) from bombarded Pokrovsk and hauling it across Ukraine and Europe to the 2026 Ukrainian Pavilion in Venice\u2014hanging from a crane at the entrance to the Giardini, the deer greets the Biennale visitors. The installation of rescued plants (Refugees [2023]), living creatures , suddenly makes obvious the scale of Kadyrova\u2019s moving things around, saving metaphors from under bombs, performing woman\u2019s endless care for the world. Watching the rave, we looked at the war. Here, we appreciate the loving care and resilience coded in every gesture, and yet one wants to ask: what if the war ends, but it has already entered Ukrainians\u2019 bloodstream?<\/p>\n
Curators Bj\u00f6rn Geldhof and Oleksandra Pogrebnyak set Ukrainians in dialogue with international artists, bringing together joy and sadness, the prayer of hope and the prayer of grief showing that there is no other life, a war just offers an intensified version of it. Next to Kadyrova\u2019s flowers, Ashfika Rahman\u2019s stunning installation of 4,849 Hindu temple bells draws attention to other refugees: displaced Indigenous communities of a conflict-affected border region of Bangladesh (Than Para \u2014 No Land Without Us [2025]).<\/p>\n
Alevtina Kakhidze, who could be called a conceptual cartoonist of this war, offering herself and society a pinch of humor as self-therapy, set a tattoo studio (Joy [2026]) where viewers can get a tattoo of her sarcastically captioned drawings (limited edition, complete with an artwork originality certificate), among them various symbols of resilience such as a tardigrade\u2014a micro-animal that can survive almost anything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Still Joy \u2013 from Ukraine into the World PinchukArtCentre & Victor Pinchuk Foundation Palazzo Contarini-Polignac May 9\u2013August 8,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":973,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[402,406,405,408,404,417,410,411,403,407,415,419,414,418,412,409,413,416],"class_list":["post-972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}