Curated by Chus Martínez
Organized by TBA21 and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
Roman Khimei & Yarema Malashchuk’s Pedagogies of War, curated by Chus Martínez, explores how the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine reorganizes perception and public space. Working with Kyiv surveillance footage, the duo, recent recipients of the Curatorial Prize at OFFSCREEN Paris, shows how daily rhythms and democratic structures fracture under violence and material pressures. Their work exposes the fragility of peace, the aesthetics of emergency, and the uneasy coexistence of forgetting and remembering. Pedagogies of War reminds us that ecologies of conflict (political, emotional, territorial) shape identity as forcefully as geographies do.
The exhibition brings together four significant works: the newly commissioned Open World (2025), co-produced by TBA21 for the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts; You Shouldn’t Have to See This (2024), a previous work by the artists; The Wanderer (2022), part of the TBA21 Collection; and a new site-specific commission for the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Pedagogies of War: War at Distance (2026). Together, these works create a multi-temporal exploration of war, memory, and agency, examining how states of emergency are aestheticized, how survivors and bystanders become agents, and how repetition can open a space for doubt, empathy, and transformation.
Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk have been working as filmmakers and visual artists since 2016, exploring the intersections of documentary and fiction to engage with Ukraine’s recent history and present. Their work examines the lingering structures of post-imperial power and their impact on a new generation of Ukrainians, caught between historical trauma and an uncertain future. Through multi-channel video installations and cinematic narratives, they capture the fractured nature of reality, where collective memory and personal experience intertwine. The duo’s practice reflects on the role of the extra, the unseen figures of history, and the ways in which individuals navigate shifting political and social landscapes.
They received the main award of the PinchukArtCentre Prize (2020) and the VISIO Young Talent Acquisition Prize (2021). Their recent short film Additional Scenes won the main awards at Tallinn Black Nights IFF 2024 and the Ukrainian Film Critics Award. The duo has participated in the Future Generation Art Prize 2021, Baltic Triennial 14, Gothenburg Biennial, and Kyiv Biennial, as well as group exhibitions at Haus der Kunst, Castello di Rivoli, and Albertinum. They have also presented solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Hannover and Galeria Arsenał, Białystok. Most recently, the Ukrainian art duo have received the Curatorial Prize from the OFFSCREEN Paris art event for their video installation You Shouldn't Have to See This.
Their video works are part of collections at Fondazione In Between Art Film, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Kontakt, TBA21, Frac Bretagne, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, and Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, among others. Their most recent installation was presented at Dare to Dream, a Collateral Event of the 60th La Biennale di Venezia 2024.
Yarema and Roman are members of the Prykarpattian Theater, an art group that recently established the project Theater of Hopes and Expectations, which was presented at the Ukrainian Pavilion during Venice Biennale Architettura 2023.
MORE ABOUT THE ARTWORKS
Open World (2025)
Blurring the line between surveillance and intimacy, Open World meditates on exile, memory, and the emotional potential of technological mediation. What happens when a weapon of war becomes a portal to memory?
In Open World, a young Ukrainian boy who fled his war-torn neighborhood with his family reconnects with his past through a military-grade robotic dog, now repurposed as a conduit for memory and presence. From abroad, he remotely navigates familiar streets, encountering old friends, neighbors, and the remnants of a life left behind. Blurring the boundaries between surveillance and intimacy, this video-based installation explores themes of displacement, exile, and technological mediation. By transforming a weapon of war into a tool for emotional and spatial reconnection, the work reflects on resilience and the evolving ways technology shapes our ability to remember, return, and remain connected across distance.
Produced by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary for the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, 2025. Supported by the Pontevedra Art Biennial.
You Shouldn’t Have to See This (2024)
The silence of the video installation You Shouldn’t Have to See This emphasizes the blissful yet fragile moment of empathy brought about by the sight of sleeping children. At the same time, this act of observing triggers a feeling of unease. Khimei and Malashchuk filmed Ukrainian children who had been forcibly taken into Russian territory and later returned to Ukraine. The estimated numbers of those abductions range from 20,000 to over a million cases since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014. While drawing attention to this heinous war crime, the artists offer a compelling account of childhood during the ongoing war.
By deliberately violating the boundaries of privacy, crossing the line between the loving gaze and voyeurism, Khimei and Malashchuk question the production of war images and examine their inherent conflict of representation: each such image is first and foremost evidence of a crime and only then and only potentially a work of art (one that should never have been created). The act of observing can lead to a false sense of involvement or to a feeling of relief that arises from the aesthetic qualities of the images. Nonetheless, authentic images and their existence in the public sphere serve as testimonies with genuine political impact.
The Wanderer (2022)
In The Wanderer, five distinct scenarios unfold against the picturesque landscapes of the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine. The camera lingers on lifeless bodies arranged to blend into the natural surroundings, appearing dead and exposed to the elements. These images evoke atrocities and explore our repeated exposure to graphic content, using timeless representations of fallen soldiers to navigate a complex terrain of voyeurism, repulsion, and empathy. Occasionally, this ambiguity is resolved when the bodies speak, interact with laptops, or assume distorted, violent poses with limbs unnaturally twisted, embodying the horrors of death in war. Produced by the Ukrainian duo Malashchuk and Khimei shortly after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, The Wanderer serves as both a rehearsal and a premonition of the escalating Russian-Ukrainian conflict. The film offers a profound reflection on the militaristic nature of nationalism and the politics of memory, while also seeking to recover the genealogies of occasionally forgotten Ukrainian artists.
The work’s title alludes to Romanticism’s crowning achievement, Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, whose genesis and critical reception are closely linked to the rise of German nationalism, the Napoleonic wars, and the ideologization of the sublime as the ultimate expression of modern introspection and individualism. Following in the footsteps of the German master, Malashchuk and Khimei deliberately sought out landscape configurations reminiscent of the classic Romantic view. A rock formation resembles the famous stone mount of the original Wanderer. The pine forest through which Friedrich’s Chasseur in the Forest (1814) roams freely is replaced by birch trunks. However, instead of a heroic figure towering over the landscape, The 2022 video is populated by multiple bodies of Russian soldiers.
Notably and to complicate matters, The Wanderer also pays homage to the iconic photo-series “If We Were German” by the Ukrainian artistic collective Fast Reaction Group. In this series, created in 1994, the artists and their friends reenact the actions of German Wehrmacht soldiers, exploring the themes of militarism and exploitation through scenes of sexual abuse and deviance. What seems to connect these two seemingly incompatible references is the question: Is there a continuity between the history of art and intellectual work in Germany and the atrocities later committed by German soldiers in the name of the nation and its “purity”?
By invoking these earlier works, Malashchuk and Khimei deflect the Western gaze, which singularizes the achievements of venerated artists and thinkers to look away from the violence and war enacted by their compatriots. By re-enacting scenes of death within classic Romantic settings, now alluding to Russian occupiers during the Russian invasion, they illustrate the civilizational rupture unfolding before us. These intertextual references bridge past and present conflicts, while demonstrating a keen sense for the metaphysics of repetition.
