Maturity is beautiful but no more than innocence oil on canvas, 2025 Kateryna Aliinyk’s project emerges as a feminist intervention into an existing work by Waldemar Tatarczuk. By creating her own painting over the work of an established artist and curator, Aliinyk does not displace the original image; instead, she complements it, preserving its initial style. She destabilizes the role of the artist — the master, the more experienced and renowned figure — while striving not to erase most of the original. The work thus becomes a ground for discussing authorship, the role of the artist, the curator as a key figure, masculinity, power, and authority in the art field. What constitutes an artwork, and what is its original form? Tatarczuk’s work becomes material from which a new artistic language is built here and now. By giving his work to Aliinyk, Tatarczuk rethinks his own role as an artist, posing an open question about what exactly an artist is capable of giving, transmitting, or offering to others.

Yaroslav Futymskyi feat. Waldemar Tatarczuk untitled, video performance, 2025 video-documentation Sophia Gera In this performance, artist Yaroslav Futymsky reflects on how someone else’s experience can be felt, transferred, carried, shared, and interpreted. At times, the answer to this question is far less simple than it appears at first glance. Sometimes this experience is heavier than any stone.

Granit, metal, 2025 Waldemar Tatarczuk meets Nikita Kadan on the shared ground of the flag as discourse. Over the years, Tatarczuk has systematically expanded his collection of short video works depicting national flags – cropped out of their wider context, filmed against the sky, fluttering in the wind, or at times falling limply. Pointing the camera at banners in different parts of the world was never the result of a pre-planned project; rather, this practice can be understood as a visual meditation on the relationship between space, the symbols of power that inhabit it, and identity – both individual and collectively constructed. The sculptures by Nikita Kadan that reference the figure of the flag also form an expanding corpus, developed since the onset of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014. Since then, the artist has been working with materials marked and transformed by war – molten by explosions, torn apart by blasts, pierced by bullets. This brutally shaped matter constitutes the substance of Kadan’s flags: works that are partly found objects, partly material evidence in the ongoing case of the war itself. The metal from which the flag was made was transported from the combined heat and power plant in Kryvyi Rih. The granite used for the pedestal of the flag presented in the exhibition comes from Korostyshiv—a town in the Zhytomyr region that in May became the target of a massive Russian aerial attack directed at civilians. Korostyshiv is known for its granite quarries and stone-working plants, which produce, among other things, tombstones. The metal for Flag consists of fragments from one of DTEK’s thermal power plants in the Dnipropetrovsk region. This plant, like energy infrastructure across Ukraine, has been shelled with missiles and drones for the fourth year in a row. TPP DTEK’s alone have suffered more than 210 strikes.

Zhanna Kadyrova, Waldemar Tatarczuk By Weight. Palyanytsia River stone, Construction foam block, Limestone, 2025 The Palianytsia project, initiated by Zhanna Kadyrova in 2022, is now known worldwide and, for international public, it has become one of the emblematic works of Ukrainian art in the era of full-scale Russian aggression. The exhibition presents three sculptures from this cycle. One is made of a river stone Kadyrova found in Transcarpathia. The other was created from debris carried downstream by the Dnipro River toward its mouth at the Black Sea, following the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam by Russian invaders. Another, third stone loaf is the work of Waldemar Tatarczuk, who treats Kadyrova’s practice here as a model to follow and a skill that must still be learned. For the material of his own stone loaf, he chose limestone – a soft and easily workable rock, but less durable and lacking the striking effect of the river stones Kadyrova typically uses. Choosing limestone thus represents the decision of a beginner in stone sculpture – Tatarczuk had not previously worked with this material. For the artist, however, this choice also carries symbolic meaning; Tatarczuk sees in it an allegory of the kinds of decisions being made in Poland and, more broadly, in Europe – a Europe reluctant to make an effort, seeking easy solutions, which does not necessarily mean the best ones..

Vlodko Kaufman The shadow of a flag video, 2024-2025 In Vlodko Kaufman’s video, the shadow of a fluttering flag falls across the ground. It is hard not to think of it as the shadow of a state cast onto the landscape, transforming it intoterritory. It is also hard not to think that, while watching this work, we find ourselves in asituation similar to that of the people described by Plato in the cave allegory of his Republic. We do not see whose banner waves above the landscape. Is it our flag? A foreign one? In the frame, not only is the flag casting the shadow invisible, but so is the figure of the artistwatching that shadow – and yet his presence is palpable, betrayed by the hand-held camera. Waldemar Tatarczuk responds to Kaufman’s work with his own collection of images of flags. We see them in frames from short video clips he filmed in various parts of the world during his artistic travels. In the late-modern era, artists led the life of nomads – or at least they did so during the epoch of ‘the end of history’, which was supposed to begin after the Cold War. The postmodern artist appeared as a figure that did not fit within the borders of nation-states and cultures; freely crossing them, an individualist, a citizen of the world acting under the banner of art – and of his own unique identity. In the process of globalisation, borders were expected to become relics of the past, remnants of a divided era. Yet today, they not only persist; they become front lines. Flags, too, have not been consigned to the archive of history: raising a banner over someone else’s territoryremains the symbolic culmination of conquest, while defending a flag remains a symbol of resistance and endurance.

Pavlo Kovach with Waldemar Tatarczuk Numbers (detail) acrylic on canvas, 2025 Pavlo Kovach serves in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He works at headquarters, where his responsibilities include handling cases of soldiers reported missing at the front. Each such disappearance is assigned a specific registration number. Kovach, who did not abandon his artistic practice after being mobilised, has invoked these numbers in his artistic actions, inscribing them, among other places, on laurel leaves. The painting presented in the exhibition is the result of a collaboration in which Waldemar Tatarczuk assumed the role of executor of a painterly scenario developed by Pavlo Kovach. The work refers both to Kovach’s own artistic practice and to the work of the Polish artist Roman Opałka (1931–2011). In the mid-1960s, Opałka initiated a painting project entitled OPALKA 1965 / 1 –, referred to by the artist himself and by critics as the ‘Programme’. He continued this project for three and a half decades, until his death. As part of the ‘Programme’ Opałka painted consecutive numbers in white paint on canvases, beginning with the numeral “1.” The first painting was executed on a black background; in subsequent works, he continued the count on grey grounds that gradually grew lighter with each new canvas, moving steadily toward white. In accordance with Kovach’s concept, Tatarczuk works on a canvas of the same format – 196 × 135 cm – used by Opałka. He repeats the gesture of painting numbers in white, but transforms its meaning. In Opałka’s work, counting had an existential dimension: the paintings functioned as personal clocks measuring the artist’s own passing time. In the work created through the collaboration between Kovach and Tatarczuk, each number conceals a different person, their drama and unknown fate; within the abstract digits is inscribed a landscape of contemporary, war-torn Ukraine.

Denys Pankratov, Waldemar Tatarczuk Roses from Dobropillia. Roses from Lublin. 2 objects: glass, roses 8 photographs: pigment print on Dibond 2025 At the center of the collaborative work by Denys Pankratov and Waldemar Tatarczuk is the image of roses — a symbol often associated with Donbas, where Pankratov is currently serving. From there, he sent Tatarczuk photographs, most of which depicted roses: taken in Dobropillia and Bilozerske shortly before these towns became inaccessible due to intensified shelling. In return, Pankratov received photos of roses from Lublin, the city where Tatarczuk lives, a place that also falls into the category of inaccessible landscapes due to the duty and necessity of being elsewhere. Thus, in this work, roses become a very different symbol — one of connection, memory, distance, male friendship, and human vulnerability and fragility.

The exhibition presents several works by Anton Sayenko united by the image of the landscape. The artist gazes attentively into the horizon, seeking to convey its unsettling nature, and at the same time, its tenderness and closeness. Sayenko’s deserted landscapes are charged with emotional presence. While searching for an answer to how one can understand another person’s experience and share their anxiety, Waldemar Tatarczuk performs a critical gesture: he places his own image inside one of the lightboxes. Yet the question remains open: can a gaze directed at the same space truly allow us to share someone else’s fate, or is this only an illusion of closeness?

In recent years, particularly since he moved to Kyiv from his native Mariupol, Vasyl Tkachenko has focused primarily on figurative painting. His practice, however, also includes film and photography. Tatarczuk, too, made use of a camera. The starting point for the collaboration between the two artists was a photograph taken by Tatarczuk in Tkachenko’s studio. In the foreground, we see the painter himself; in the window behind him, Tatarczuk’s reflection is visible. The artists agreed that each of them would paint their own work based on this photograph—a double (self-)portrait. In this way, a dialogue of two gazes emerges: a record of an encounter taking place within a single image.

The installation Sticks, Rods, Poles was first presented as an artwork in 2024 within Turina’s solo exhibition A Few Kilograms of Exhibitions, with a changing display. These sticks, branches, a whip, pointers, a fishing rod, an umbrella, a broken mop, and other objects were collected in various ways over a longperiod. Each carries its own story and at the same time signifies nothing. Yet in the gallery space, they are not accidental: they speak of the non-randomness of life and reference the practices of Artem Badulaiev, Denys Pankratov, Daria Kuzmych, Yurii Kruchak, Yulia Kostereva, Katia Libkind, and Tiberii Silvashi, while casually glancing inward at the legacy of Collective Actions. An artist who works with life as a living material invites the viewer to reflecton what simple objects are, what meaning ‘unnecessary’ or ‘excess’ things sometimes carry, what ‘excess’ even is, and what makes old wooden slingshots the most precious among all valuable things.