Veronika Synenka

The art group “Institute of Automation” emerged in the premises of the former Kyiv Institute of Automation at 22 Nahirna Street, where an artistic community spontaneously began to take shape in 2016–2017. Its founders, Maksym Mazur and Andrii Pidlisnyi, recount how the open-studio format evolved into the NGO “Nahirna 22”; how their collaborative practice developed—from working with found objects to kinetic art and experiments with cold as an artistic medium—and how the full-scale invasion affected both the space and the artists’ practice itself.