Essential Goods at Pavilion of Culture

Curated by Sonya Kvasha and Isabella van Marle, the group exhibition Essential Goods offers a perspective on the landscape of Ukrainian photography today.

Overview

Reflecting the landscape of Ukrainian photography today, Essential Goods is a group exhibition featuring works by more than 20 young artists. Produced from 2014 to 2024, their varied projects are held together by a common thread: of what it means to make art in and of a time of war. When the future is uncertain, they ask: ‘what constitutes an essential good?’

Throughout the exhibition, themes of love, family and absence merge and overlap; the artists’ stories guide us between raves and graves, through bombings and blooming gardens. Where some have changed creative course in recent years, others find resistance in the familiar, remaining steadfast in their subject matter. At times their works address the war directly. At times they speak with tenderness and humour to the quieter everyday moments that live alongside catastrophe.

Whilst Stephan Lisowski captures fragments of his journey across Ukraine, Dima Tolkachov begins to find distorted faces in bullet holes. Nazar Furyk, meanwhile, is drawn to the candy- coloured flower beds and toy castles in a recently liberated Bucha. As Kristina Podobed portrays her son growing up abroad, Daria Svertilova focuses on a wilted bouquet – a couple of weeks old – abandoned by her mother when fleeing her home. Elsewhere, Elena Subach turns her lens from people to objects: she studies chairs, ‘islands among waves of people’, lined at the border at the start of the full scale invasion.

Opening in Kyiv on the 23rd May, Essential Goods is set across the Pavilion of Culture: a 1967 modernist landmark, now a curatorial institution at the intersection of contemporary visual art, music and architecture. With the outbreak of full-scale war, its programme was suspended, and its buildings became a depot for humanitarian aid. Material remnants of this chapter form a maze-like backdrop to the show.

The exhibition is curated by Sonya Kvasha, a Kyiv-based creative director, and Isabella van Marle, an independent curator and co-founder of Pictures for Purpose. Both have previously organised print sale fundraisers in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. After meeting in Paris, Sonya and Isabella’s conversations touched upon the distinctive visual languages being developed by emerging Ukrainian photographers – and the importance of platforming their work.

As a partner of the exhibition, Paris’ MEP – Maison Européenne de la Photographie – invites local visitors to attend a virtual opening from the museum’s auditorium. With a programme of talks and discussions, the evening features contributions from Vita and Boris Mikhaïlov, Juergen Teller, Oliver Frank Chanarin and Simon Baker.