PinchukArtCentre presents the group exhibition It’s Only the End of the World
13 November, 2025. Kyiv – PinchukArtCentre presents the group exhibition It’s Only the End of the World curated by Oksana Chornobrova. This show is implemented as part of the program for developing emerging curatorial voices, which has been running for several consecutive years. The exhibition will feature works by seven Ukrainian artists: Kateryna Lysovenko, Anna Nykytiuk, Vladislav Plisetskyi, Zhenia Stepanenko, Fedir Tetyanych, Illia Todurkin, and Olha Stein.
The exhibition explores the sense of catastrophe that has become an everyday life. The end of the world here is not a metaphor for the apocalypse but a statement of reality — the one Ukrainians live in every day. “We have learned to exist in a state of constant crisis, perceiving the extraordinary as normal,” says curator Oksana Chornobrova.
The central idea of the exhibition is mutation, within which a person transforms subtly yet incessantly. Like other living organisms adapting to their environment to survive, humans emerge in new, hybrid bodies. The exhibition invites us to look at ourselves after several years of the “end of the world” state — to see what we have lost and what we have multiplied.
“I wanted to speak not only about loss but also about how, in its place, emerges a space for something else — for a new way of being,” notes the curator.
The project draws attention to the strange and the unnoticed — life that continues in its peculiar yet resilient forms. Processes of destruction and rebirth in the context of catastrophe are accelerated and sometimes occur simultaneously. The exhibition opens a perspective on birth from ruin — just as rare biological species return after human disappearance, new ways of being, feeling, and creating arise after social or emotional collapse.
In her work Mermaid Embryo, Kateryna Lysovenko continues her exploration of mythological images of vulnerability and bodily memory that bear witness to a universal experience of survival.
At the center of Zhenia Stepanenko’s video Ryzhyk Turns into a Butterfly, and the Fox into an Earthworm is a species of fungus, Cladosporium sphaerospermum, that grows in highly radioactive environments, including on the reactor of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Anna Nykytiuk, in her work Nowhere and with No One, reflects on the absence of choice in times of war.
The poem by Fedir Tetyanych embodies the author’s philosophical belief in the eternity of life and the future rebirth of humankind. He perceives the world as a single organism in which everything is interconnected.
