The competition commission has selected the project that will represent Ukraine at the 61st Venice Biennale, which will take place in 2026. This was announced by Deputy Minister of Culture Halyna Hryhorenko.
The winning project was ‘Security Guarantees’ by sculptor Zhanna Kadyrova and a curatorial group consisting of Kseniya Malykh and Leonid Marushchak.
The competition committee included: curators of the project that represented Ukraine at the previous biennale, Viktoria Bavykina and Maxim Gorbatsy; artists Petro Bevza and Oleg Tistol; curator and programme manager of the Goethe-Institut Ilona Demchenko; Anastasia Manulyak; and Khristina Beregovska.
The project centres on Zhanna Kadyrova's sculpture ‘Deer’ from the ‘Origami’ series, which was installed in Yuvileynyy Park in Pokrovsk (Donetsk Region) in 2019.
"After 2014, state and public attention to cities in eastern Ukraine intensified. Yuvileynyy Park in Pokrovsk was built in 1982 and dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the USSR. Thirty-six years later, in 2018, the park began to be reconstructed, and I was asked to create a sculpture for the pedestal from which a Soviet military aircraft had been dismantled, symbolising the military power of the Soviet Union," Kadyrova comments.
In 2024, during the evacuation of Pokrovsk residents, the NGO ‘Museum Open for Renovation’ removed the deer sculpture from the combat zone.
"Since the start of the full-scale war, my priority has been to secure and evacuate historical and cultural treasures from the combat zone. Last year, we took all possible measures to remove the deer sculpture from Pokrovsk. For us, this is not just a garden sculpture — it is a symbol of modernity in the context of the transformation of historical narratives in public space. And the current history of the sculpture and all the processes surrounding it is a symbol of the modern tribulations of symbols of the past against the backdrop of contemporary challenges," said Marushchak, co-curator of the project.
In addition to the deer sculpture itself, the exhibition will also feature the documentary film ‘IDP,’ created with the participation of Natalka Dyachenko, which captures the process of evacuating the sculpture with fragments of conversations with local residents. There will also be archival materials related to the park in Pokrovsk and the Budapest Memorandum.
