Lizaveta German, Maria Lanko, Borys Filonenko

The National Pavilion of Ukraine at the 59th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia is the result of a collaboration of three independent curators: Maria Lanko, Lizaveta German and Borys Filonenko. They were united by the desire to represent Ukraine at the Biennale Arte 2022 and to reintroduce the practice of Ukrainian artist Pavlo Makov to the world.

Maria Lanko and Lizaveta German have produced more than 30 joint projects in 10 years of cooperation. Among them are Powerful verticals, plywood colonnades commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Young Artists Festival at Mystetskyi Arsenal (now named the Young Art Biennale) entitled Today, that never happened.

In 2013, Lizaveta and Maria launched the Open Archive — an online archive of contemporary Ukrainian art. In 2018, they founded The Naked Room gallery, which quickly became one of the most dynamic and visible spaces of the contemporary art scene in Kyiv. The curators consider it their goal to create a transparent art market system in Ukraine and build relationships between artists and various audiences.

Borys Filonenko is an independent curator, art critic, lecturer, and editor-in-chief of IST Publishing (Kharkiv). Since 2011, Borys has been researching the artistic practices of Pavlo Makov. In 2018, together they co-authored a book — Do Po. He was a co-curator of the Second National Biennial of Young Art (Kharkiv, 2019), Aeneas Path. Artists of the Present Face to Face with the Past (Kharkiv, 2019) and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Kyiv, Lviv, 2016) exhibitions. In 2015—2018 he was the curator of the Kharkiv Come in gallery. During 2017—2021 — tutor and curator of the Humanities Department at the Kharkiv School of Architecture.

In 2021, the project of the Ukrainian national pavilion proposed by the curators won a competition organized by the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine.

The project Commissioner is Kateryna Chuyeva, the Deputy Minister of Culture and Information Policy.

(Von der Website des ukrainischen Pavillons.
© Foto: Eugene Nikiforov, Courtesy Nationaler Pavillon der Ukraine)