Kostiantyn Doroshenko/Tie2.lt

Ksenia Malykh was one of the faces of the most renowned private Ukrainian contemporary art institution, the PinchukArtCentre, for nine years. There, she headed the Research Platform. For six years she managed a gallery at the Closer art center in Kyiv, founded on the grounds of a former ribbon-weaving factory.

At the height of Russia’s war against Ukraine, in 2024, she became the head of the Promprylad Art Center in Ivano-Frankivsk. The center’s space, located within the structure of a revitalized factory, covers 1,350 square meters across three floors.

The first exhibition there, “How Is It Made?” by Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, was seen by around 1,500 visitors within the first two months of operation. The ready-made objects and obsolete machines presented in the exhibition were perceived simultaneously as aestheticized and mournful: former industrial power suspended between museumification and disposal.

Ksenia Malykh has repeatedly worked on projects that were presented at the Venice Biennale. She is currently the curator of the Ukrainian Pavilion at this forum. The project “Security Guarantees” will present Zhanna Kadyrova’s sculpture Origami Deer. In 2019 it was installed on the site of a dismantled Soviet Su-7 aircraft in Pokrovsk, Donetsk region. Today the city lies on the front line, where fierce battles are ongoing.

Evacuated from Pokrovsk, the sculpture is traveling through European capitals before being shown in Venice, serving as a reminder of the failure of the security guarantees given to Ukraine in the Budapest Memorandum in exchange for renouncing nuclear weapons.

“Curators’ roles need to be reconsidered,” was your thesis in an interview with the publication post impreza. Why does this need exist, and in what direction do you propose this reconsideration?

Rethinking the role of curatorship today is, above all, a shift in focus. We are used to a model in which the curator is the center of a project, but other approaches exist. First, there is a model oriented toward supporting artists. Here the curator acts as a partner, interlocutor, caretaker, or producer. It is a deep interaction in which context emerges through dialogue.

Second — and this is what I am thinking about most at the moment — is institutional curatorship. Here it is important to reconsider the position of the curator within the team. Often a divide appears: there are “content creators,” and there are managers who service that content. I propose abandoning the model of “management as a service.” The goal is to create a space where managers are not separated from the content but are its co-creators. It should be horizontal collaboration rather than hierarchical servicing of ideas.

Promprylad Art Center emerged from the project Promprylad.Renovation—an ambitious center located on the grounds of a revitalized factory whose history dates back to 1905. How does an institution that declares a movement toward the democratization of art interact with the investment and business goals of Promprylad?

We are part of a large ecosystem, and this is primarily about a horizontal exchange of expertise rather than subordination to business goals. For example, we are actively building cooperation with other initiatives at Promprylad: Pole (workshops) and Petros (a center for interaction between veterans, military personnel, and civilians). We are also significantly supported by the Promprylad Foundation. It is important to understand our legal and conceptual autonomy: we are a separate public organization. Our program and vision are not influenced by the investment plans of the innovation center; that is exclusively the prerogative of our supervisory board.

Promprylad helped us find founding patrons whose contributions cover the basic needs of the team and the institution. This provides stability, but for each individual artistic program or exhibition we fundraise separately. This model allows us to maintain independence while being integrated into an environment where art does not exist in isolation.

Did you take into account other Ukrainian experiences of artistic revitalization of industrial enterprises, in particular the Donetsk-based center Izolyatsia?

I deeply respect Izolyatsia’s contribution to the history of Ukrainian art and their experience in building new communities. However, we cannot and do not aim to replicate their model.

Our task is to test a different financial logic for the existence of a cultural institution. We combine contributions from private donors, grant programs (both Ukrainian and international), and actively engage Ukrainian businesses. We want to create a model that could be replicated in other contexts. It is a search for a viable framework in which culture is not subsidized or dependent on a single source, but integrated into the economy as a full partner. Our goal is to demonstrate that an art center can be financially sustainable and autonomous.

What meaning do you attach to the concept of the “ethics of revitalization”?

For me, the ethics of revitalization is primarily about responsible coexistence and working with the memory of a place. We are residents of the Promprylad innovation center, and it is important to us that this ecosystem embodies a model of impact investing, where social impact on the city is no less a priority than profit. As an art institution, alongside the projects of the Promprylad Foundation, we add an ethical dimension to this revitalization through culture, which prevents the space from becoming purely functional or merely office-oriented.

Ethical revitalization means that art does not become an instrument of gentrification or simply a “decoration” for expensive real estate, but functions as an inclusive environment for different communities. We are not entering a “blank slate,” because this building has its own industrial history, and for us revitalization means bringing life back in a way that respects the history of the people who worked here for decades.

Ethics also lies in the financial model and positioning: we are not an “appendix” to business but build relationships with patrons as equal partners. We aim to demonstrate that culture is an integral part of a healthy urban organism—one that keeps it alive, critical, and capable of genuine renewal rather than merely cosmetic renovation.

The first exhibition of Promprylad Art Center is How Is It Made? by Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk. It touches both on the history of the factory and on the process of revitalization. It is also an indirect but important conversation about the war — about the Soviet industrial legacy and the practices of urbicide that Russians are applying against Ukraine. What meanings were embedded in the exhibition, and which ones perhaps unexpectedly emerged through it?

The exhibition How Is It Made? is an attempt to museify a transitional state. We began by taking Soviet machines from the 1960s out of storage, cleaning them, and covering them with glass. Through this gesture we objectified the industrial heritage, turning it into an exhibit before its final disposal. But next to it we placed another sheet of glass covering a television showing the work Explosions Near the Museum. This is a “museumification of emptiness,” a metaphor for the heritage stolen and destroyed by Russians, for the practices of urbicide that we witness every day.

The central element became the video work of the same name by Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, How Is It Made? It was created in 2021, when the factory was in the midst of transformation: the old production was still operating, but the first residents of the innovation center were already appearing. At that time it seemed like a look into a “post-industrial future.” But now, in the midst of a large-scale war, we read this work differently. It is no longer simply about workshops being replaced by offices, but about our ability to look into the future when the very right to that future is being taken away from us.

Unexpectedly for us, the exhibition opened up further through the artists’ new work Four Seasons (2025). It became the final point that “grounded” the viewer in the present state of things. We realized that the exhibition is not really about the history of the factory itself, but about our own transformation together with this place. It is a conversation about fragile balance and a “new normal” that is constantly being challenged. We realized that we have both the luxury and the urgent need to speak about the past precisely in order to find solid ground under our feet today.

The center’s new exhibition, The Field Has Grown Over with Wormwood, was created by participants of your School of Cultural Competencies. What kind of initiative is this?

The School of Cultural Competencies is our educational initiative aimed at preparing a new generation of professionals in the cultural sector. We wanted to create an environment where theory immediately transitions into practice, so the exhibition The Field Has Grown Over with Wormwood became a logical conclusion to the program and the first serious curatorial experience for the school’s graduates.

The curatorial group of the project — Polina Hoch, Vitalii Hrekh, Siia Kit, Anastasiia Pasieka, and Rina Khramtsova — went through the entire process from idea to the realization of the exhibition.

The overarching theme they chose is “return” as a form of accepting one’s own experience. It is a very fitting metaphor for our time: we speak about returns that are physical, imagined, metaphorical, and sometimes entirely impossible. As the curators themselves note, quoting historian Pierre Nora, we talk so much about memory precisely because so little of it remains. The image of a field overgrown with wormwood becomes a framework for difficult questions: how can we protect our places and memory today, and how can we accept irreversible changes in order to move forward?

The exhibition brings together works by twelve Ukrainian artists, including both classics — for example Opanas Zalyvakha — and representatives of the contemporary scene such as Bohdan Bunchak, Sana Shakhmuradova-Tanska, Pavlo Kovach, and others. It is important for us that this project is realized with the patronage support of Yehor Grebennikov, as this is another example of the viable model of cooperation between culture and private capital that we mentioned earlier.

In 2023 the exhibition How Are You? at the Ukrainian House in Kyiv was the largest event of Ukrainian art after the escalation of Russian aggression. The concept of polyphony realized there — a large group of curators and more than 100 artists — became a trend in Ukrainian artistic representation. However, for those who follow this approach it often turns out to be cacophony rather than polyphony. Mechanical reproduction of the practice of involving a wide circle of curators and authors leads to a blurring of responsibility for the curatorial statement. How do you perceive this tendency and the project The Field Has Grown Over with Wormwood in this context?

Collective curating is an extremely complex intellectual and logistical process that requires a high culture of dialogue. In the project How Are You? at Ukrainian House this approach was justified by the scale of the events and the need to capture a shared state through a multiplicity of voices. However, such an approach can lead to fragmented statements rather than a multilayered project, where behind the large number of names a clear authorial position and responsibility for the final message are lost.

As for The Field Has Grown Over with Wormwood, we consciously chose the format of collective work primarily as a learning exercise. It allowed the graduates to go through all the subtleties of the profession in a safe yet professional environment — from conceptual debates to technical realization. For them it was an opportunity to learn how to build a shared perspective without losing individual visions. I believe that through such practical interaction young curators learn to sense the boundary where a coherent collective statement ends and a compromise collection of statements begins.

You are the curator of Ukraine’s national project at this year’s Venice Biennale. In 2024 you co-curated the exhibition From Ukraine: Dare to Dream in the Biennale’s parallel program. These are very different projects in terms of visual language and scale. Yet both attempt to find ways to speak to the world about the war through the language of art. What did you hope to say, and what has been possible to convey?

These projects truly differ greatly in their perspective. From Ukraine: Dare to Dream, presented by PinchukArtCentre in 2024, was an attempt to move beyond the current catastrophe and assert Ukraine’s right to the future — the right to dream and to participate in global conversations. We wanted to show that even in the midst of war we are capable of generating meanings that are relevant to the entire world.

By contrast, this year’s national project, Security Guarantees, is a much more focused and direct statement. Through the story of a single object — Zhanna Kadyrova’s Origami Deer — we speak about the devaluation of agreements and the fragility of the international order. It is a conversation about how a humanitarian gesture turns into a political metaphor under the pressure of reality.

What has been possible to convey? I think we have managed to shift the conversation about the war from the realm of “news and statistics” to that of “values and responsibility.” We show that the Ukrainian experience is not a local tragedy but a crisis of the entire global security system. It is important for us to make this vulnerability visible: a concrete deer that imitates paper becomes a symbol of those very guarantees that proved defenseless in the face of force.

Art here does not simply illustrate the war — it becomes evidence. The 3,000-kilometer journey of the Origami Deerthrough European capitals is testimony to the fact that in today’s world no pedestal is high enough and no signature strong enough to guarantee peace. And this is precisely the realization we want to convey to an international audience: security is not a piece of paper — it is shared action and responsibility for every given word.