Venice’s Pinchuk Art Centre exhibition trades glamour for wartime witness
The Pinchuk Art Centre’s Venice Biennale presentation has undergone a stark transformation since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Once known for exuberant opening-week parties and a guest list that could include Elton John, the institution’s Venice project now functions as a direct artistic response to war, loss, and endurance.
This year’s exhibition, Still Joy — From Ukraine into the World, is on view from 9 May to 1 August at the Palazzo Contarini-Polignac in Dorsoduro, overlooking the Grand Canal. The presentation brings together work by Tacita Dean, Julian Charriere, Malaschuk + Khimey, Ashfika Rahman, Zhanna Kadyrova, and Simone Post, pairing Ukrainian artists with international voices in a show that asks how joy can survive under extreme pressure.
The emotional and conceptual center of the exhibition is Hlib Stryzhko, a former marine who survived a catastrophic explosion and Russian captivity. Through a foundation for veterans run by Svitlana Grytsenko, the Pinchuk Art Centre met Stryzhko, who has since become a story-gatherer, interviewing combat survivors about how to continue living after trauma. Excerpts from those conversations are scattered through the palazzo’s rooms, printed on glistening pink scrolls by Bodhana Kosima. The installation has a fairytale surface, but the testimony it carries is unsparing: limb loss, death, and the swampy smell of rescue after violence.
Stryzhko spoke at the exhibition’s official opening on 7 May in military uniform and a blue beret. He described the wonder of being offered strawberry-flavored chocolate in one of his darkest moments. That detail captures the show’s central tension: joy appears, but only briefly, and never as a substitute for grief.
The works reinforce that balance. In the opening footage by Ukrainian video art duo Malaschuk + Khimey, dreamy faces drift through rave scenes in Kyiv. Ashfika Rahman’s large-scale sculpture of tiny bells is marked by the fingerprints of displaced women. Zhanna Kadyrova’s light box photographs of bombed-out interiors are especially affecting: in each image, a single pot plant remains amid the rubble, one of the plants she rescued and brought to Venice as a symbol of endurance.
The exhibition also broadens the frame beyond Ukraine. Simone Post’s vast chandelier installation, which reimagines Venetian design through materials associated with childhood, suggests a reclaimed innocence, though one that feels deliberately fragile. The point, the exhibition argues, is not that joy erases devastation. It is that both joy and loss belong to a wider human condition, even if war makes them newly visible.
In Venice, that argument gives the Pinchuk Art Centre’s presentation a quiet force. It is less a spectacle than a sustained act of witness, and one of the Biennale’s clearest reminders that contemporary art can still hold contradiction without resolving it.
