In a series of filmed interviews responding to the exhibition, Give Me Tomorrow, Maksym Kohutiak speaks with community members, who have varying relationships to their Ukrainian heritage, about the impact of these video works on Canadian audiences and the importance of asserting a right to a tomorrow.

A conversation with Zoya Laktionova by Svitlana Shymko

Oleksandra Tokareva works in a very meditative watercolor technique, which is called washing out. Drawing helps her not only to express her position but take care of her mental health during the war.

The book covers the 12-year history of the MUHi Competition, capturing the changes and trends in the young art of this period. Having collected an archive of the cooperation of young Ukrainian artists with the MUHi Competition, it reflects the changes in young art over the last decade. At the same time, the book seeks to find answers to the most pressing questions: how did the pace of socio-economic and technological development affect the formation of creative practices of young artists? how did political changes and upheavals in Ukraine affect young people? how can art create the ground for change and provoke qualitative changes in public life?

This conversation between the artist Vlada Ralko and the researcher Milena Khomchenko was finished on May 13, 2022. To be more precise, it happened on the 79th day of the war, following Vlada’s note on the way Ukrainians perceive the time since February 24. That day the Azovstal plant, cities of Mariupol, and Kherson were still under the occupation; Russian soldiers were continuing shelling and fights in Izium, Krasnopillia, Horlivka, Velyka Novosilka, Siverskodonetsk, Rubizhne, Vuhledar, and other cities of Ukraine while also using cluster munitions in Korabelnyi district of Mykolaiv. That day, as well as the other days, these names of the small Ukrainian peripheral towns or villages were left on the outskirts of the international communication channels. However, these events continue being the foreground of all even detached discussions of those who are attached.

Before February, Lviv-based artist Kinder Album addressed sexuality in her works, but now she is more interested in death. She models clay into bones and explosions — basically expressing the thoughts she has these days.

A project by Anna Khodkova and Kristina Yarosh — Etching Room 1 — is a combination of techniques and paradoxes. The artist use the etching technique originating from the XVI century to depict urbanist spaces and ironic reality coverage. And their latest works are about how our fears of war have become real.

New City of Friends is Malashchuk and Himey’s first solo exhibition, and is on view in May 2021 at Shcherbenko Art Centre in Kyiv, Ukraine. The production of a solo exhibition is part of their prize for winning the biannual Young Ukrainian Artists’ Competition (known locally as MUHi, its Ukrainian language acronym) in 2019.