LVIV — The city of Lviv has been a hub for Ukrainians fleeing Russian assaults and brutality since 2014, serving as a home to humanitarian projects like Superhumans and Unbroken that provide rehabilitation, support, extensive therapy, and prosthetics for war victims. Though it has not suffered nearly the volume and intensity of Russian attacks as have regions further east, it is far from immune to the current war. The storied, cathedral-rich city dating to the 13th century is subject to aerial attacks, including a recent one that killed one civilian and injured many more on August 21, shortly after I departed.
I was there to visit The Stammering Circle, a signature component of Faktura 10, a year-long series of exhibitions, art projects, concerts, performances, films, and symposia mostly in Ukraine (two events were in New York). Faktura 10 Chief Curator and Director Marta Kuzma, an American from a Ukrainian immigrant family, was a crucial figure in the post-independence 1990s Ukrainian art scene. Now she’s come home, so to speak. The title of the exhibition, which is on view at Jam Factory Art Center and two other venues, references the Romanian-Jewish poet, writer, translator, and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan (born in what is now Chernivtsi in Ukraine) — specifically his efforts to fashion a language and art in his mother tongue, German, with the ability to survive and flourish amid trauma and war.
Julie Poly, Ukrzaliznytsia (2025), framed color photograph mounted on aluminum and color photographs
Surprisingly, few artworks in the exhibition directly address the current war, and many were made years ago, sometimes far from Ukraine. However, all do so obliquely, while situating artmaking in a context of war, resistance, resilience, and fundamental humanity.
In his 2011–12 series Structures of Madness, Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov captures rugged rock formations, caves, and mountainous surfaces. Geological markings hint at human, energetic, often erotic, sometimes fantastical figures, which the artist’s adjacent drawings clarify — conflations of nature and humans. Mikhailov is from Kharkiv, now attacked daily and nightly by Russia. For me, his series assumes startling new connotations during wartime, including the fierce attachment of a people to their land.
The silhouette and drawn figures in Mikhailov’s work connect with those in American artist R.H. Quaytman’s nearby innovative paintings from her 2021 series Modern Subjects, Chapter Zero, based in part on artworks concerning pressing social issues by 19th-century Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz. An upended, headless body; a solitary, small orphan; a suicide with a pistol — these resonate in contemporary Ukraine.
Yana Kononova, Incendiary Lands (2025), black-and-white print from negative (photo Gregory Volk/Hyperallergic)
Yana Kononova’s large-scale, black and white photographs, at once voluptuous and foreboding, are of mud volcanoes and rocky terrain in oil-producing Azerbaijan, formerly part of the Soviet Union. They are coupled with “Incendiary Lands” (2025), comprising reprints of archival photos in a vitrine showing derricks and infrastructure from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Russians were central to the development of the petroleum industry in Azerbaijan. Now, oil and gas fuel the Russian economy and war machine: Oil profits equal death for Ukrainians. Many countries are looking to independent Azerbaijan as a replacement for Russian petroleum. Kononova was born on the Azerbaijani island of Pirallahi and emigrated with her family to Ukraine during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War from 1988 to ’94 (part of the nation’s ongoing attacks on Armenian communities and cultural heritage). She is now living through another war. Juxtaposing geological and human time, her primeval landscapes link fossil fuels with global warming and war.
Conceptual, visual, and material correspondences course through this sensitively curated exhibition. A single, prominent sunflower in Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki’s street scene “Tokyo Fine Day” (1993/2025), one of several photographs from early in his career in the exhibition, is especially apt here: The sunflower is a symbol of Ukraine. Lebanese artist Walid Raad’s vibrant inkjet prints are geometric abstractions that also resemble flowers, including sunflowers in some cases, as in the series Appendix 153, part of The Atlas Group (1989–2004) which archived imagined stories and artifacts of the Lebanese Civil War.
Walid Raad in collaboration with The Atlas Group, 1989–2004, Appendix 153 (2019), framed pigmented inkjet print
Raad’s accompanying fictional story indicates that these prints are photographs that the apocryphal Palestinian artist Suha Traboulsi took in the late 1950s of her own work. He writes that while “many Arab art historians” perceived her paintings as forerunners of Op-Art, they were instead based on shell explosions during the ’70s in war-stricken Beirut. A small photograph of an explosion is attached to each print. Raad’s story, sly and fanciful yet vaguely plausible, is indelible. He has found a novel way of transmuting war into beauty, terror into art, without sanitizing its brutality.
Elsewhere, Ukrainian artist Julie Poly’s 2025 photographs explore the life of Ukrzaliznytsia, the highly efficient and hospitable national rail system that gives the series its name. She capture scenes of everyday life: a female soldier in fatigues curled up and asleep in a sleeper car next to her black dog, a smiling woman with several fluffy dogs and numerous trophies; a shirtless, tattooed soldier with his head bowed as if deep in thought or prayer; children with their toys, a train car transformed into a makeshift hospital, diligent conductors at work. There is such humanity in these images — joy, love, sorrow, endurance, tenderness — that contrasts so extremely with Russia’s inhumane war. A young woman lying on her back calmly gazes at the camera. She embodies the whole nation’s exhaustion and resolve.
Julie Poly, Ukrzaliznytsia (2025), framed color photograph mounted on aluminum and color photographs
While Vladimir Putin seeks to deny and eliminate Ukrainian identity altogether, a collaborative installation by set designer Janina Pedan and artist Anna-Mariia Kucherenko at the Dim 42 art space features uniquely Ukrainian symbols, signs, and ornaments dating back centuries. At the Jam Factory, a film by Moyra Davey focuses on four diasporic artists: Paul Celan; Peter Hujar, who was raised by his Ukrainian grandparents; Kyiv-born filmmaker Maya Deren, whose family fled to escape anti-Jewish pogroms in the 1920s; and Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, whose family also fled Western Ukraine during the pogroms.
Ukrainian filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski, collaborating with researcher Philipp Goll, has turned recently unearthed film footage taken by a group of Ukrainian filmmakers in Siberia in the 1980s into an extraordinary single-channel video, a travelogue of sorts titled “Where Russia Ends” (2024). Narrated by filmmaker Lyuba Knorozok, it exposes the brutality, greed, and racism underpinning the subjugation and exploitation of Indigenous peoples (notably Buryats) under the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union, accompanied by enormous environmental damage. Left implicit is that Putin’s so-called “special military operation,” which also impacts Indigenous communities at home, is more of the same; yet another Russian colonial war with devastating consequences, including ecocide.
Davey’s entrancing video “Four [чотири]” (2025), commissioned specifically for this exhibition, combines scenes of diverse people playing, dancing, communing, and exercising in Manhattan’s Riverside Park with the recitation of an excellent text about the artists, read by Davey in English and Knorozok in Ukrainian. The New York scenes include symbols of Ukrainian culture — hair, dancing, flowers, and music among them. Near this deeply touching video hang two absurdist yet ominous 1815–17 etchings by Francisco Goya with cavorting figures, women in one, men in the other. The Spanish artist was himself steeped in war and brings historical gravity to this superlative show, whose pangs and dreams still resonate with his own two centuries later.
Francisco Goya, “Disparate femenino” (1815–17) (left) and “Modo de Volar” (1815–16) (right), etching, aquatint, and drypoint on laid paper
Installation view of The Stammering Circle at the Jam Factory Art Center, with Nobuyoshi Araki’s “Tokyo Fine Day” (1993/2025) in the background and Boris Mikhailov’s Series of Four (1982–83/2025), print of contact sheet, in the foreground
The Stammering Circle continues at multiple venues across Lviv, Ukraine, through November 2. The exhibition was curated by Marta Kuzma.
