Illia Levchenko (Kyiv) is a visual studies researcher and artist working with installation. His practice focuses on the Warburgian tradition of the “life” and “afterlife” of images—their power, agency, and modes of action—as well as on the exploration of silent zones, gaps, and spaces that resist interpretation. Combining historical-visual research with artistic practice, he inhabits intermediate territories as an experimental method of knowledge production, where art precedes text and functions as a way of testing hypotheses that later receive analytical development in academic writing.

Artem Humilevskyi (Mykolaiv) is a Ukrainian artist whose practice focuses on exploring identity, history, and human resilience. Working with conceptual photography, he engages in a dialogue on collective memory and social challenges, combining self-portraiture (notably in the projects Giant and Roots) with research-based, documentary, and archival approaches. His works create visual metaphors that allow for the rethinking of history and collective memory and for expanding the boundaries of empathy. He is the recipient of the Global Peace Photo Award (Austria, 2022), the Rovinj Photodays Award (Croatia, 2025), and the Kolga Tbilisi Photodays Award (Georgia, 2025).

Tamara Safarova (Kyiv) is an artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, comics, photography, digital art, and performance, shaped at the intersection of memory, mythology, and personal experience. Born into a family of a Ukrainian mother and an Azerbaijani father, she grew up between cultures, where experiences of absence and rupture became sources of resilience. In her work, she seeks to make inner stories visible, transforming alienation and otherness into a language of visual poetry. Combining the deeply personal with the mythical and the political, and drawing on the natural world, folk symbols, and ethnographic findings, the artist explores how individual pain becomes collective memory and transforms into action.

Kseniia Kostianets / IIA KO (Kryvyi Rih) is a poet and artist working with collage, installation, and video art. Her practice engages with landscape artefacts and explores the interaction between the city and nature through tactile materials—stone, fabric remnants, wires, and threads. Transforming found objects into visual structures reminiscent of layers of Kryvyi Rih soil as a fabric of memory, the artist combines hand stitching, dyeing, and fabric painting with documentary video materials.

Renata Asanova (Kyiv) is an artist working with painting, drawing, and ceramics, combining mixed media techniques and experiments with form. Her practice focuses on exploring identity and femininity in the context of cultural hybridity and displacement. For the artist, clay becomes a connection to the Crimean land of her ancestors and a means of shaping memory—fragile, multilayered, and silent. Working between calm and impulse, contemplation and embodied emotionality, she investigates how cultural memory and women’s experience can coexist within a single visual language, where tenderness, silence, and vulnerability emerge as acts of resistance and healing.

The residents worked in Kryvyi Rih on new artworks, participated in curatorial sessions, artist talks, and lectures, explored the city’s industrial and post-industrial spaces, engaged with the local community, and presented the results in the format of a final exhibition curated by Kostiantyn Doroshenko. The exhibition was divided into several parts: Kryvyi Landscape. Awareness and Kryvyi Landscape. Alignment.

Awareness is a process that requires effort. It is not about stating facts, not about a comfortable version of reality, not about myth-making or affirmations. It is about a willingness to confront reality—its circumstances and its history—without preconceived judgments. Today, we are living through the realization that stability, predictability, international law, and many other things have turned out to be an illusion. Instead of order, chaos peers daily into our windows and our minds. This is a challenge of readaptation, and awareness is its very ground.
Kryvyi Rih is an industrial city. One may regard this as fate or as a sentence, but such a stance excludes the future. A reduced, simplified future is merely decline. The exhibition Kryvyi Landscape. Awareness offers examples of how, by looking around and in between, one can sense the unexpected within the familiar. The future is born from the unexpected.
Unexpected, too, are the materials of Oksana Zharun’s artistic practice—coal coke, industrial dust, and the like. Her background in chemical technologies and engineering, combined with a thoughtful observation of Kryvyi Rih, the city she lives in, leads the artist to compelling visual and conceptual generalizations. Her work Breakfast of Champions refers to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel of the same name. The object grotesquely undermines the cliché “industry feeds us,” exposing its toxicity for life, health, and the future of inhabitants of industrial landscapes, and bringing the problem into focus as a global one.
“The illusion of stability in the industrial world collapses, just as the formula ‘industry feeds us’ does, calling into question the continuity of the long history of extraction and processing. The work focuses on passivity and the delegation of responsibility to a system that promises stability in exchange for freedom of choice. This motif resonates with the events of the novel, where a crucial turning point occurs when the character believes in the possibility of freedom—even within a dystopian reality,” says Oksana Zharun.
Renata Asanova used local geological formations of Kryvbas in her works. Kryvyi Rih inspired her to express herself in various media, with a recurring theme being the awareness of the need to move beyond the paradigm of resource extraction. This idea is concentrated in the object Something Like Value—a piece of Kryvyi Rih shale with abstract engraving. The artist reflects: “This work is an attempt to look at rocks not only as a resource, but as a presence. And perhaps to draw a parallel with human beings—with how easily we begin to perceive ourselves and each other solely through function, usefulness, productivity. The stones lie nearby, demanding no explanations, and offer a different rhythm of looking—slow, attentive, non-instrumental. To see value in a stone that promises nothing and gives nothing is to allow oneself to look at the world not only through efficiency and results. It is a way to step out, if only for a moment, of the logic of extraction—not only in relation to materials, but also to people and to ourselves. In this sense, stone is not the goal but a mediator. It is very convenient for this role because it is maximally ‘unexplainable’ and silent. It does not ask for attention and does not try to be valuable. All value arises at the moment of pause and attentiveness. To see such value in stone is to train the ability to be alongside rather than to use; to allow oneself slowness in a world of acceleration.”
Renata Asanova’s landscapes Spoil Heap and Sprouting are illuminated by the iconic Kryvyi Rih rust-red color, simultaneously brutal and tender. Together with her installation Reclamation, which inscribes bizarre ceramic flora into an imagined spoil-heap landscape, they resonate with the exhibition Kryvyi Landscape. Rooting, adding an awareness of the duration and unpredictability of the recovery process. The artist observes how nature, mutilated by human aggression through exploitation and now by war, “returns not to an original state, but to a new one—unknown, complex, sometimes тревожний (unsettling).” Yet it always returns, because nature has an infinite potential for adaptation and development. And we are part of nature.
Anyone who has seen the quarry of the Southern Mining and Processing Plant in person remembers the encounter forever. One can gaze into its cosmic landscape for hours, as if into a separate world, or imagine it as a grand location for the world premiere of an unheard-of symphony. Illia Levchenko recalls how, at this site, a guide asked the artists for silence in order to listen to the “symphony of labor.” “It consisted of the whistle of air preceding the movement of giant machines, the sounds of trains, the creaking of metal, the vibrations of the earth. Almost every day at 12:00 in Kryvyi Rih, one hears cannonade announcing quarry blasts. The notification of a BelAZ truck departure resembles an air-raid siren. Explosions at the site sound like air defense systems at work or distant strikes. It becomes clear that war changes the acoustic experience. At the same time, city residents—and quarry workers in particular—call it the heart of Kryvbas. They compare the blasts in the depths to a heartbeat, and the quarry’s landscape pattern to the shape of a heart. For many, these sounds are soothing: they mean that ‘the heart is beating,’” the artist explains.
These impressions unexpectedly resonated with Illia Levchenko’s own experience, both personal and professional as an art historian. In Kyiv, he lives in a building adorned with the mosaic Symphony of Labor, created in 1967 by Ernest Katkov and Valerii Lamakh. A central place in it is given to the metallurgist. The ceramic panel echoes the aesthetic explorations of Ukrainian artists of the early twentieth century. It is worth realizing that for those who, in the late Soviet period, sought to escape the suffocating constraints of socialist realism, monumental art became a refuge, offering more space for visual solutions. Hryhorii Synytsia, a native of Kryvyi Rih, was one such figure.
In his multimedia installation, Illia Levchenko overlays audio recordings of the sounds of the Southern Mining and Processing Plant quarry onto the documentation of the mosaic Symphony of Labor in Valerii Lamakh’s book. “In the space between these layers lie reflections on the real and the imagined; on how the medium works; on resource extraction; and, ultimately, on modernity—since war and the distribution of resources, their extraction, are different phases of the same process. This ‘in-between’ opens up a vast space that becomes an impulse for thought,” the artist shares.
From this impulse of thought, awareness is extracted.
Kostiantyn DoroshenkoCurator of the project

Photo by Anna Balvas

“They were once living women, and in summer they reaped grain in the steppe, and on that very day the sun began to change. And it changed for a long time; it disrupted the women’s work—it appeared only toward evening. The women did not forgive it and began to spit at it and curse it: ‘May this and that happen to you! Because of you we lost time!’ And for that they turned to stone and went blind.” This folkloric version of the origin of steppe balbals, known locally as stone babas, recorded at the hamlet of Dubova Balka (now part of Kryvyi Rih), is cited by Hryhorii Huseinov in the anthology On the Land, on Our Native Land…. This folk tale may serve as a metaphor for an industrially exploited landscape, where nature and industry exist in constant conflict. The result is the transformation of time itself into a stone baba—frozen and, at the same time, worn down.
The year-by-year self-reproduction of wear instead of progress can be interrupted through a new alignment of the self and of social strategies with the landscape—by sensing in the concept of “alignment” not only the obvious meaning of “agreement,” but also that of “dignity.” By understanding that dignity is present in nature, in labor, in architecture. Dignity respects boundaries, aligns interactions, and manifests care and attentiveness.
The harsh post-industrial environment of Kryvyi Rih has shaped in its people a silent endurance, a quiet yet effective empathy. In the wartime present, these traits are rapidly and tangibly scaled up. Environmental destruction as the price of development is increasingly recognized as unacceptable harm. The wounded landscape evokes a desire for healing, for balancing, for stitching together.
It is in this way that IIA KO / Kseniia Kostianets stitches her native city into the carpet Spoil Heaps. “I reflect on recovery not as an act of restoration or a return to a ‘normal’ state, but as a long process of reconfiguration—material, symbolic, and affective,” the artist emphasizes. Ecological tension, passion, and tenderness toward the native city pulse in this dramatic panel. “Spoil heaps, formed within the framework of Soviet industrial policy, are often represented as symbols of progress or productive power. In my work, they are rethought as traumatic landscapes—spaces of violence against the land, the body, and local communities. Through the use of textiles and threads, I return local sensitivity and cultural subjectivity to these forms, opposing imperial narratives. My idea is grounded in care, restoration, and interdependence,” says Kseniia Kostianets.
Tamara Safarova turns to a radical experience of aligning herself with the city through an act of intimate trust. During the residency, the artist realized a performance by practicing a hypnagogic state (between sleep and wakefulness) outdoors in various locations in Kryvyi Rih—the quarry of the Southern Mining and Processing Plant, the ruins of the Batkivshchyna mine, the spoil heap of the Shmakivskyi mine, and near the Red Lake. Based on the performance, the video Sleeping Landscapes was created, “built on fragmentation, layering, muted images, and the absence of documentary clarity.” Tamara Safarova shares: “In the process, I clearly saw a parallel between attitudes toward the industrial landscape and toward the female body: both have historically been perceived as resources; touch occurred without consent; control justified exploitation; and after exhaustion—discarding. My gesture does not reproduce this logic but resists it, restoring subjectivity: to the landscape—through attentive, listening presence; to the body—through sleep, voluntary vulnerability.”
Artem Humilevskyi’s Terraforming invites the viewer into a playful interaction with the recognizable landscape of Kryvyi Rih. The development of his artistic practice—previously centered on photography, which brought the artist a number of international awards—is expanded here through work with programming code. Artem Humilevskyi addresses the responsibility each of us bears for the environment we inhabit, and for the creative agency involved in harmonizing it. “The project Terraforming proposes a shift in vector—from consumption to healing. It is an act of reverse industrialization. In this interactive installation, the viewer ceases to be a passive observer. With the help of a digital algorithm, each visitor ‘takes root’ in a virtual landscape. The human body becomes the trunk, and consciousness—the crown of a tree. Metaphorically, we become a new forest that fills the scars of the earth. This is a visualization of ‘gentle ecology’: not through aggressive struggle, but through symbiosis. We show that humans are not necessarily a virus for the planet. We can be the resource that restores its balance. The more people participate in the project, the denser the forest on the screen becomes, transforming a dead desert into a living garden,” the artist says.
The landscape, like each of us, will never be complete. It will always be slightly crooked. Life manifests through imperfection, unpredictability, diversity, and interdependence. By internally consenting to this, we align ourselves with the future. And time, disenchanted, instead of a sentence of wear, opens itself to co-creation.
Kostiantyn DoroshenkoCurator of the project

Photo by Anna Balvas