ukrainian pavilion Pa Ma
Since 2001, Ukraine has regularly presented its pavilion at the Venice Biennale. However, on February 24th, 2022, the Ukrainian team decided to suspend the installation work as a result of the Russian invasion. Nevertheless, one of the curators managed to retrieve fragments of Pavlo Makov’s work, Fountain of Exhaustion: High Water, from the Ukrainian capital. The team plans to recreate the
rest of the project on-site in Venice. Born in 1958 in St. Petersburg, the Ukrainian artist was chosen last summer to represent the Ukrainian pavilion in Venice (despite technically being an enemy alien that dominated Ukrainian culture for decades). As the artist says, it is his citizenship that is determining for him, unlike his ethnicity, which is his own private affair. “I speak four languages, including Ukrainian and Russian. I have no problem with languages. As for ethnicity... Hitler and the Soviet Union were very concerned about it, but I couldn’t give a damn...”, he said in an interview on the eve of the war.
As long-standing residents in Ukraine, Makov and his family have remained in Kharkiv, the big city in the east of the country, which is being devastated by bombs as these words are being written.
At the beginning of the invasion, the pavilion’s three curators, Lisaveta German and Maria Lanko (from The Naked Room gallery) and Borys Filonenko (the editor of IST Publishing) were in Kyiv (Kiev is the Russian name). Under the cover of bombs, Maria Lanko managed to reach Venice, bring back the missing fragments of Makov’s work, and proceed with the installation of the pavilion. The central, emblematic object of the exhibition is a kinetic installation: a fountain consisting of 105 funnels arranged one above the other in a triangular shape, which might also evoke a tree. Unlike some fountains where the water gushes forth, Makov’s pours from top to bottom and is gradually depleted, symbolising psychological and physical fatigue, the exhaustion of emotional and natural resources. The funnel, which appears in many of the artist’s works, becomes the symbol of the pavilion, which will have five entrances and five exits to enable visitors to come and go from different directions.The pavilion will therefore resemble an urban space, where visitors can stop and think whilst listening to the flowing water.
SYMBOLIC FOUNTAIN
The project dates back to the mid-1990s, when the urban landscape of Kharkiv was undergoing major changes. Infrastructure accidents in abandoned water pipes and fountains confronted the artist with the exhaustion of natural resources; the fountain became the starting point of his creation. Despite a number of attempts, the Makov Fountain was never displayed in the urban space of Kharkiv. At the time, the artist himself considered his project to be too “sad and marginal” to be presented to the general public, in a country that had become independent, and in light of the difficulties of the post-Soviet era. Makov’s approach to the transformation of urban landscapes, reflected in his work, echoes Italo Calvino’s novel, Invisible Cities (1972), which the artist reread constantly: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together.” Later, the Fountain of Exhaustion took on a new dimension: it became a shared metaphor for all the countries that have acquired an ecological awareness. This explains why the curators of the Ukrainian pavilion also plan to show archival documents and works by the artist dating back to the 1990s, in order to reveal the long genesis of the project. His exhibition in Venice will therefore be doubly symbolic: of the war in Ukraine and of Venice itself, confronted each year by floods which are exacerbated by global warming.
De gauche à droite from left:
Pavlo Makov. Fontaine d’épuisement. Solution architecturale pour le pavillon ukrainien for the ukrainian pavilion par by Forma. Fontaine d’épuisement. 1995. Dessin drawing. (Court. l’artiste)