Temporary Exhibitions
The artist’s creative pursuits are deeply rooted in the realities of his time: the challenges of memory, the struggle for personal identity in a modern world, and the individual's perspective within a newly globalized way of life. His artistic research also embraces the past, with a particular focus on humanizing our attitudes toward it. At the heart of his work stands the individual—one who inevitably absorbs collective experience, not by choice, but by necessity. This experience is mirrored in reflections of fear, hope, and forgetting.
Contemporary Ukraine, gripped by war, finds itself on the edge of an abyss—a place where everything is tested: faith, loyalty, and the desire to remain oneself. This is not merely a clash of worldviews or a battle for land—it is also a struggle to assert one’s rightful place in history, to make one’s voice heard amid the chaos of modernity. In this forced war, a new identity is born—not from ruins, not from memory, but from what crystallizes into resilience, steadfastness, and the will to move forward. It is a fight for the word, and for the silence that follows the explosion—when self-understanding begins to emerge.
The project highlights that, for modern post-Soviet societies, the question of choice remains crucial: as if we were drifting between two worlds—the one that has arrived and the one yet to come. Our present burns like fire in the forge of history.
The works in the cycles Millstones of Time, Forced Disorientation, The Attainment of Individuality, and The Anxieties of the Black Earth represent an attempt to find answers that emerge in the space between past and future. After all, every person carries the weight of memory and, simultaneously, the possibility of choice. Identity, like time itself, is fluid and ever-changing. A person is not static—they run, stumble, fall, rise, gesture, scream, fall silent, and rediscover themselves. Only time—a demanding artist—reveals its image like a developing photograph. There is no end, just as there is no final word in the monologue of memory.
The author of the project is Victor Sydorenko — Ukrainian artist, curator, creator of photographic compositions and conceptual objects, as well as academic and journalistic texts. He is President of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine, a participant in the 50th Venice Biennale, founder and first director of the Institute of Contemporary Art.
Victor Sydorenko has taken part in numerous group exhibitions both in Ukraine and internationally, including at Mystetskyi Arsenal and the America House (Kyiv), the Museum of Modern Art (Toulouse, France), Galleria Forni (Bologna, Italy), Saint Mary’s Cathedral (Paris, France), Saatchi Gallery (London), Black Square Gallery (USA), the United Nations Headquarters (New York), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki, Finland).
His solo exhibitions have been held at the National Art Museum of Ukraine, the National Kyiv Art Gallery, the Yermilov Center (Kharkiv), the Lviv National Art Gallery named after Borys Voznytsky and the Lviv Palace of Arts, the State Museum of Arts of the Republic of Kazakhstan named after Abylkhan Kasteev (Almaty), the Woodrow Wilson Center (Washington, DC), Black Square Gallery (Miami), and numerous museums and galleries in France, the UK, and beyond.
Sydorenko’s works have frequently appeared in international auctions and are included in many public and private collections, including the National Art Museum of Ukraine (Kyiv), the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki), Yale University and the Yale Sc
hool of Art (USA).
