Ukrainian cultural institutions and artists are carrying on restoring and creating art as Russia continues to target the country and its cultural identity.
Among them is the Nahirna 22 arts collective, which runs 30 artist studios in the Kyiv Institute of Automation, and was hit by Russian air strikes that killed at least 23 in Ukraine’s capital in August.
Marta Nyrkova, a co-founder of Nahirna 22, tells The Art Newspaper that three artists’ studios were forced to move and many more were damaged. A video posted to Instagram shows blown-out windows and rubble on the floor, as well as pock-marked canvases on walls.
The building housing the Nahirna 22 arts collective was damaged by air strikes
Courtesy of Nahirna 22
The studios have been a wartime refuge for artists and visitors to “share their feelings, pain, fear, all emotions in their artworks”, in which they can “create a new wave of Ukrainian identity” that makes “resistance visible” in Ukraine and abroad, Nyrkova says.
Heritage saved
Meanwhile, the Mykhailo Boychuk State Academy of Decorative Applied Arts and Design in Kyiv, named after a seminal Ukrainian Modernist executed in 1937 during Stalin’s Great Terror, was hit during a 2024 Russian missile strike. In July 2025, contractors were able to save surviving works and fragments from the academy’s archives, including “many objects of painting, weaving, embroidery, ceramics, jewellery and sacred art” and student works, according to the academy’s director, Olena Osadcha. Their efforts were supported by Unesco’s Ukraine office, the Japanese government and Ukraine’s culture ministry.
Workers assess a damaged painting recovered from the bombed Boychuk Academy
Photos: Bohdan Poshyvailo, archive of the Maidan Museum/ACURE
“Surprisingly, almost intact icons, works made in the technique of hot enamel, mosaics and frescoes were found,” Osadcha says. “Among the unique items are linocuts from the late 1920s by the artist Maria Kotlyarevska, a representative of the Boychuk school.” Costumes, textiles and embroidery were among the most damaged works.
A new programme at the academy, titled Restoration and Reconstruction of Works of Decorative Art, builds on this practical experience for conservation work that lies ahead. The academy sponsored a student architectural competition to design new facilities and has hosted international conferences as well as the BoychukFest. The festival featured an exhibition of 25 years of textile, embroidery and costumes created by students and teachers that were extracted intact from the rubble, and the Symbols of Identity project highlighting “key symbols of Ukrainian statehood”, especially the trident (the emblem of Ukraine), Osadcha says. In April and May 2025, a contemporary art exhibition, Body/Fragility, addressed the missile strike while also serving as “proof that, despite the war, life goes on”, she says.
A Unesco spokesperson tells The Art Newspaper that “documentation is scheduled to be completed early next year” for “full reconstruction of the affected buildings”.
‘A living chain of resistance’
Ihor Poshyvailo, who coordinated rescue work at the Boychuk Academy as co-founder of the Agency for Cultural Resilience (Acure) and director of the National Museum of the Revolution of Dignity, tells The Art Newspaper that “more than 90% of the items recovered from the rubble were stabilised, cleaned, documented and packed” and “over 560 artworks were triaged from the debris”. Kotlyarevska’s linocuts, for example, were “cleaned, and preserved in acid-free folders” and “around 150 textiles, canvas paintings carefully removed from stretchers and rolled onto tubes”.
Poshyvailo says “the sheer number of works saved—despite lying for more than a year under debris—proves that cultural rescue operations, though arduous and dangerous, are worthwhile and necessary”. The “71 museum workers, cultural first-aiders, restorers, lecturers and students from 21 institutions” who gathered at the academy for the training and stabilisation work “formed a living chain of resistance through culture”, carrying on even when 25 people were killed in Kyiv by a Russian air strike.
Reverence for folk art is a source of Ukrainian resilience
“While Russia bombs Ukraine’s schools, museums and archives, Ukrainians are preserving the very memory those attacks attempt to erase,” he says, citing reverence for folk art as a source of Ukrainian resilience. Cultural workers have also had to compensate for the slashing of much US funding under the Trump administration. “European institutions and Unesco help to fill part of this gap, but they are not enough,” he says.
Meanwhile, the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv, in its latest collaboration with Ukrzaliznytsia (the Ukrainian railways), commissioned a public installation by Lesia Khomenko for the city’s main train station. “There is a need for creating monuments, specifically for the war,” says Björn Geldhof, the centre’s artistic director. “How do you deal with monuments, with public art at a time when everything is still going on?” He curated the installation and a solo show of Khomenko’s work at the PinchukArtCentre.
Lesia Khomenko’s new installation Motion, at Kyiv’s main railway station
Photo: © Ela Bialkowska
Khomenko created Motion, a 21m-high, 12m-wide 600kg installation during a 1½-month residence at the station through which 60,000 passengers pass daily; “a place essential for Ukraine’s survival”, Geldhof says. He described Motion as a “public, monumental piece, but in a very temporal sense”, a kind of “anti-monument” in a style merging Impressionism and Futurism. Positioned opposite two escalators, it engages “with the reality of the place and the architecture of the venue”.
Soviet monumentalism deconstructed
Geldhof says, “this work is so amazing because it captures in a single image what Ukraine is today and how it has been able to defend itself as effectively as it has because it is continuously in motion”, with individuals taking on multiple roles, for example “a florist and drone maker”, a phenomenon he says is “not necessarily understood in the West”.
Khomenko says she sought to capture “the ‘motion’ of time and history”, using the escalator as a visual tool to convey the metaphor. Working on the installation was also an opportunity to “deconstruct the idea of Soviet monumental art”, which was built into the train station during a post-Second World War reconstruction.
“We invited a group of people to take part in the photo shoot that I used as a source for my composition,” she says. “A real soldier, a veteran, a war photographer, railway workers, rescuers, med-evacuators and army doctors, civilians of different ages, volunteers, a barista and an artist were stepping down the escalator while having their picture taken on a camera with long exposure to illustrate the idea of motion. This effect helped me to blend people together.”
Coffee is key
“At night-time there are heavy Russian drone and missile attacks and scary explosions hit our buildings,” she says. “So people usually are very sleepy in the morning. That’s why I depicted the barista in my piece. The coffee is important.”
Iryna Dobrovetska, an illustrator from Odesa, lost multiple works displayed in and near Kyiv in the early days of the invasion, including a giant pysanka (traditional decorated Ukrainian Easter egg) that she created for a 2016 festival.
The “special kindness and understanding” that she encountered when she came to London as a refugee in 2022 kept her going, she says. She was shortlisted and commended by the judges of Britain’s Folio Book Illustration Award 2025 for her illustrations of Rapunzel. The recognition coincided with her apartment in Odesa being severely damaged by a Russian strike in July. “I believe that one should not submit to fate,” she says. “There is always the possibility of some way out.”
