Before the opening of the Venice Biennale, the “Invisible Pavilion” project was created, dedicated to Ukrainian cultural figures who died as a result of Russian aggression.
This was reported by journalist Zoya Zvyniatskivska on Facebook.
The initiative was initiated by the Association of Ukrainian Organizations in Italy (NAU) . As part of the project, posters with an “alternative” program of the Biennale were placed in Venice – events that will never take place because their participants were killed by Russia.
In particular, among the announcements:
- reading with Victoria Amelina, who died after a missile strike on Kramatorsk in 2023;
- presentation of a children's book featuring Volodymyr Vakulenko, who was tortured and killed by Russian soldiers during the occupation of the Kharkiv region in 2022;
- discussion with film director Igor Malakhov, who died in 2023 near Avdiivka;
- poetry reading with Nika Kozhushko, who died as a result of the shelling of Kharkiv in 2024.
Each poster bears the inscription: “Cancelled! The author was killed by Russia,” as well as a QR code that leads to a monitoring website for losses among Ukrainian cultural figures, created by PEN Ukraine. Currently, the database contains hundreds of names of artists whose creative careers were cut short by the war.
“People who created Ukrainian culture can no longer do this – because Russia killed them. And then the world asks us – where are your poets? Where are your Booker Prizes, your novels of the century, your exhibitions in the best museums in the world, your Oscars? Well, here they are – all here. In this monitoring. In our “Invisible Pavilion” at the Venice Biennale,” wrote Zoya Zvynyatskivska.
About the Ukraine project at the Biennale
At this year's Venice Biennale, Ukraine will present the project “Security Guarantees” . The curators of the pavilion are art historian, curator and program director of Promprylad Art Center Ksenia Malykh and historian, researcher of Ukrainian cultural heritage, head of the public organization “Museum Open for Renovation” Leonid Marushchak .
The central object of the project is Zhanna Kadyrova's sculpture “Origami Deer” , which will be exhibited in a public space – on a truck crane on the lagoon embankment.
In 2019, with the help of Denis Ruban, “Origami Deer” was installed in a park in Pokrovsk on the site of a dismantled Soviet jet aircraft that was a carrier of nuclear weapons. And in 2024, when the front line approached the city, the sculpture was evacuated.
In addition to the sculpture, archival materials related to the Budapest Memorandum will be presented, as well as video documentation of the sculpture's evacuation and its journey to Venice, created with the participation of Natalka Dyachenko, Pavel Sterets, and Max Masl. This part of the exhibition will be presented in the Ukrainian pavilion at the Arsenal.
Thus, the Ukrainian Pavilion project raises the topic of unfulfilled security guarantees , for the sake of which Ukraine got rid of its nuclear arsenal in 1996.