Exhibition Crooked Landscape

Illustration

When: May 16 – June 13, 2026
Where: Zaporizhzhia Center for Contemporary Art
Free admission!

Kryvyi Rih is often called “a city as long as a lifetime.” Its landscape was shaped by the rhythm of extracting iron ore, coal, and other minerals. The Soviet modernist project prioritized industrial efficiency without sentiment toward either nature or people. The official glorification of labor celebrated only human productivity and utility. The shadow of this legacy still influences the perception of Kryvyi Rih today. Yet its landscape is far more nuanced — it continues to transform through the will, care, and creativity of the people who live here and believe in their city despite bombings and blackouts. Landscape is a phenomenon greater than the combination of nature and architecture. It is a space of human experiences, memory, actions, and dreams. Within it coexist the past as we understand it, the everyday choices we make, and our visions of the future.
The exhibition “Crooked Landscape” is the result of a dialogue with the city by artists from Kryvyi Rih and other regions of Ukraine. Their works are personal, emotional, at times painful — not formal responses to a theme. Russia’s war has left us no possibility to look at landscape from a detached distance. The surrounding world becomes deeply personal once you realize how threatened and fragile it is.
The title of the exhibition reminds us that in nature there are no perfectly measured forms or combinations, no universal visual balance; every landscape is, in one way or another, crooked — shaped by an unpredictable number of factors against which architectural, engineering, and economic calculations prove powerless. We propose to look closely at this crookedness, as well as at the distortions of our own destinies: to accept them, to recognize within them possibilities for growth, and to learn to love them.
Critic Illia Turyhin writes:
“When asking why, in moments of existential crisis, we return again and again to nature, the Ukrainian experience of war — particularly the experience of threat, loss, and pain — becomes deeply illustrative and resonant. Both the experience of metaphorically identifying oneself with an environment suffering from warfare, and the experience of temporary or permanent loss of a landscape that can only be revisited through memory or art, are equally painful and formative in the shaping of identity. Is it possible, then, to truly move away from anthropocentrism and decolonize our view of nature, if landscape remains such an essential part of human existence?”
Many of the works in “Crooked Landscape” turn toward images of vegetation, growth, and roots. Under the daily assault of death and violence deliberately inflicted by the aggressor, the resilience, endurance, and vitality of nature become a source of strength. Strength for existence, presence, and movement. We are learning to look at landscape anew. This is not cartography, nor aesthetic admiration. To see is not the same as to look. Seeing is participation. Each work in the exhibition is an act of participation in the landscape of Kryvyi Rih.
The exhibition touches upon many aspects of this phenomenon — one that is unique, yet deeply resonant with what Ukraine and the world are experiencing amid a global assault of the past against the future. The “city as long as a lifetime” lives on.
ARTISTS:● Eva Alvor (Zaporizhzhia)● Vitalii Kravets (Kyiv)● Asya Yakovlieva (Dnipro)● Renata Asanova (Kyiv)● Oksana Zharun (Kryvyi Rih)● Illia Levchenko (Kyiv)● Artem Humilevskyi (Mykolaiv)● Kseniia Kostiianets / IA KO (Kryvyi Rih)● Tamara Safarova (Kyiv)
CURATOR: Kostiantyn Doroshenko
The exhibition “Crooked Landscape” takes place at the Zaporizhzhia Center for Contemporary Art with the support of the Department of Culture and Tourism of the Zaporizhzhia City Council.
The project is реализовано by the Kryvyi Rih Center for Contemporary Culture / KRCC with the support of Jam Factory Art Center, RIBBON International, and Goethe-Institut Ukraine.

Photo from the opening night

Public initiative designed to develop Kryvyi Rih

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Public initiative designed to develop Kryvyi Rih

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