“Everything Will Be Fine in the End, and If It’s Not Fine Yet, It’s Not the End,” 2025

audiovisual installation (video, television, carpets, smartphone, radio, album of letters sent to Lviv Radio, interior elements)
Created as part of the Languages of the Landscape cycle, a project of the House of Sound at Lviv Radio Municipal Enterprise (Network of Culture and Technologies). The audio materials used in the preparation and presentation of the work are the property of JSC “Suspilne.”
Part of the project The Future is Safe was created within (Re)Grounding — a partnership programme of IZOLYATSIA (Ukraine), D6 EU (Cyprus), and D6 Culture in Transit (United Kingdom), with the support of the UK/UA Creative Partnerships programme.

Everything Will Be Fine in the End, and If It’s Not Fine Yet, It’s Not the End is an audiovisual installation that unfolds as a space of therapeutic self-soothing and ironic escape from the anxieties of the present. Drawing on archives from the 1980s — bright, seductive advertising from Newcastle in the United Kingdom and comforting educational programmes about culture from Lviv Radio — the artists bring together two opposing poles of a bygone era. From this collision emerges a surreal kaleidoscope of sounds, devices, and everyday objects.

The installation consists of two parts: The Future is Safe, which parodies naive and absurd scenarios for saving civilisation in the form of advertising clips, and We Have So Much Joy, built around comforting reassurances and rituals of self-suggestion. Combining vocal intonations, retro musical aesthetics, and a domestic interior, the duo transforms fear of uncertainty into an absurd game. Rather than responding to the future with panic, the work suggests looking at it with a bewildered smile — as a paradoxical space in which there is still room for hope and wonder.

Dasha Podoltseva is a visual artist and graphic designer based in Kyiv. She is interested in public space, urban paradoxes, practices of reuse, the ‘beautiful ordinary’, functional shifts, infrastructural absurdity and ‘temporary inconveniences’. As well as creating site-specific installations and graphic work, she curates exhibitions, leads workshops and teaches. Dasha graduated from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and studied academic drawing and painting in Oleksandr Titov’s workshop. She also studied at the Central Saint Martins summer school in London, the Peter Bankov poster school and the CANactions School for Urban Studies STUDIO #1, and co-founded the SERIA__ project dedicated to Brutalist mass housing in Ukraine. She was awarded first place at the 28th International Poster Biennale in Warsaw in 2023 and the Gold Prize at the 14th International Poster Triennial in Toyama in 2024, both for her work (Unwanted) Harvest. As a member of the creative team, she was awarded the Taras Shevchenko National Prize for the project Alla Horska. Windcuffer. Recent projects include: ‘Vidpustka na balkoni’, Ukrainskyi Dim, Kyiv; ‘Coexisting with Darkness’, Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv; ‘Fragile Dream’, DSQ Gallery, London; ‘Fragile Brutalism’, Goldsmiths, University of London; ‘Since We Are Here’, materahub, Italy; ‘The Beauty of Care’, Ukrainian pavilion at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale; ‘Ukrainian Contemporary Art’, James Gallery, New York; ‘Dreamscape’, Mala Gallery at Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv.

Oleksii Shmurak is a composer and sound artist based in Kyiv. His music explores corporeality, linguistic boundaries, and hauntology. As a performer, he works with piano and keyboards and frequently incorporates voice, amateur instruments, electronics, and spatial practices. Oleksii also composes music for film. His soundtrack for Timestamp, directed by Kateryna Gornostai, received wide attention in the international press. He has presented performances and multimedia projects at venues and institutions including Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Theaterhaus Stuttgart, WDR Hall in Cologne, the International Summer Course for New Music in Darmstadt, Muffatwerk in Munich, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the International Book Arsenal in Kyiv, and the Lviv Philharmonic. Since 2022, Oleksii has collaborated with visual artist Dasha Podoltseva. Their artistic duo explores themes of memory, the unconscious, care, play, nostalgia, and imagined futures. Together, Oleksii and Dasha construct complex, multidimensional, and dramaturgically nuanced narratives through sound and video. In their visual and object-based practice, they work with found and ready-made materials, transforming them into uncanny landscapes.

Photographer: Anton Sorochak