Shcherbenko Art Centre

We invite you to the presentation of the curatorial project “Inside Me Is a Black Hut”, curated by Maryna Hutz. The project brings together eleven Ukrainian women artists whose practices explore, in different ways, the experience of the full-scale war, loss, memory, home, and the transformation of personal identity.

The participating artists are: Kseniia Bilyk, Ania Buryachkova, Vasylyna Vrublevska, Anna Zvyagintseva, Alina Zemanova, Olha Kuziura, Yevheniia Laptii, Pavla Nikitina, Maria Proshkovska, Maria Stoianova, and Olha Shtein.

When: August 26, 6:00 PM
Where: Kooperativ (23A Sichovykh Striltsiv St., Kyiv)
Free admission.

The project consists of a series of video interviews, and its title is taken from a poem by artist Vlada Ralko from her collection Mouth and Cross (2020). Written before the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, these lines now sound almost prophetic, opening up a space for reflection on war as a profound inner experience that transforms a person, their body, memory, and way of relating to the world.

“Despite the constant presence of war, life continues. We keep working, creating, loving, having children, losing, adapting, and searching for new ways of being. It is this complex process of inner transformation that became the starting point for the project ‘Inside Me Is a Black Hut’,” says the project’s curator, Maryna Hutz.

The interview series explores themes that often remain outside public discussion but profoundly shape the contemporary experience of Ukrainian women: loneliness and abandonment, migration and the loss of home, decolonisation, volunteering, motherhood, corporeality, and memory during wartime. Each conversation reveals a different dimension of these themes through the artists’ personal stories and artistic practices.

These videos are neither conventional interviews nor biographical portraits. They create a space for reflection in which art becomes a language for making sense of reality, while personal experience becomes a way of speaking about collective trauma, memory, and the future. Through conversations about artistic practice, broader questions gradually emerge: How does war transform our sense of home? What happens to memory in times of catastrophe? Can art find a language for experiences that seem impossible to articulate?

The project is implemented with the support of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation as part of the Scholarship grant programme.

The project partner is the advertising and communications holding company Havas Village.

The institutional partner is Kooperativ, an office space for creative businesses.

Maryna Hutz is a Ukrainian curator, founder of Shcherbenko Art Centre in Kyiv, Bottega Gallery (2008–2014), and the ARTUP platform. She is the founder of MUHi, the competition for young Ukrainian artists, which has become one of the most important platforms supporting emerging art in Ukraine, as well as a co-founder of PROMIN’, an international festival of contemporary Ukrainian culture.

In her curatorial practice, Maryna Hutz works with themes of contemporary Ukrainian art, feminism, corporeality, gender identity, and women’s experiences within social and political contexts. She has realised numerous exhibition projects in Ukraine and abroad in collaboration with leading cultural institutions, including Saatchi Gallery in London, Vilnius Art Fair, the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in Paris, Mystetskyi Arsenal, the National Art Museum of Ukraine, the Odesa Fine Arts Museum, and others.

Her curatorial approach is grounded in the exploration of contemporary social processes and the role of art as a tool for critical thinking, empathy, and social change.