The international and Ukrainian contemporary art exhibition Still Joy opened at Palazzo Contarini Polignac and will run from May 9 through Aug. 1 this year. The exhibition brings together works and installations by leading international and Ukrainian artists reflecting on joy as a life force and a courageous expression of humanity.
At the core of the project — and serving as its driving force — are testimonies heard and preserved by Hlib Stryzhko, a marine veteran who returned from Russian captivity. These stories become sculptural elements through which fragments of reality find their place within the exhibition.
The project features works by Kateryna Aliinyk (Ukraine), Piotr Armianovskyi (Ukraine), Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (Canada), Julian Charrière (Switzerland), Tacita Dean (Britain), Ryan Gander (Britain), Gabrielle Goliath (South Africa), Nikita Kadan (Ukraine), Zhanna Kadyrova (Ukraine), Alevtina Kakhidze (Ukraine), Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk (Ukraine), Pavlo Kovach (Ukraine), Bohdana Kosmina (Ukraine), Katya Lesiv (Ukraine), Kateryna Lysovenko (Ukraine), Simone Post (Netherlands), Ashfika Rahman (Bangladesh), Daniel Turner (United States), Alvaro Urbano (Spain), Lesia Vasylchenko (Ukraine), and Oleksii Sai and Yurii Hruzinov (Ukraine).
Hruzinov also drew attention with a protest performance at the opening of the Russian pavilion, where he arrived carrying a notebook titled “List of Bastards 2026.” A similar notebook had previously been seen on the desk of Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency.
The Still Joy exhibition unfolds in a carefully structured sequence. It begins with a video installation featuring scenes from Kyiv rave parties filmed by artistic duo Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei before and during the full-scale war. It continues with Kateryna Aliinyk’s idyllic landscape, where small fauna vibrates beneath the moonlight, and Piotr Armianovskyi’s video essay combining the realities of war with dreams experienced by the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
The floor concludes with a large-scale installation by Simone Post created specifically for the venue. The work reimagines the palazzo’s interior as a sweet, temporary architecture made of real candy, inviting visitors into a fleeting moment of childhood joy.
The exhibition then follows individual stories — of lost communities and love finding new forms. Future Generation Art Prize laureates Ashfika Rahman (Main Prize, 2024) and Zhanna Kadyrova (Special Prize, 2014) explore experiences of displacement, resilience, care and responsibility for one another in their works.
Rahman’s shimmering installation, made from Hindu temple bells suspended on golden silk threads, enters into dialogue with plants rescued from bombed Ukrainian buildings — part of Kadyrova’s installation composed of lightboxes and living plants that journey as “refugees,” recovering and receiving care.
In Gabrielle Goliath’s video installation, joy is deeply personal — at times empowering and at others filled with sorrow. In the latest chapter of her long-term project, Ukrainian soldiers and civilians from the LGBTQIA+ community share personal testimonies.
Joy as memory and love is also present in Tacita Dean’s 39-minute film If I Were in Adlon (2025), featuring Ukrainian artist Boris Mikhailov and his wife, collaborator and muse Vita Mikhailova. The film captures one evening at Berlin’s Hotel Adlon, known for its associations with Cold War intrigue and espionage.
Nearby is Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s installation Conversations with My Mother (2023), in which telephones become threads connecting people with those who are no longer alive.
The exhibition then shifts toward themes of landscape and the body. Works by Dean, Kakhidze, Urbano, Sai, Gander, Charrière and Kadan each examine in their own way how human presence leaves traces and scars.
From Dean’s large-scale analog photograph of a century-old cherry blossom tree to Urbano’s metallic viburnum sprout — a plant untouched by those wishing to smell or pick it — the works quietly dissolve into the simple joy of surviving on the battlefield.
In the same exhibition hall, Kakhidze has installed a tattoo studio where visitors can literally leave the exhibition’s mark and memory of joy on their bodies forever.
The exhibition concludes with a monumental drawing by leading Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan depicting a historic “quiet rave” scene, where bodies transform into a landscape balancing between emergence and loss.
The exhibition is presented by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation and the PinchukArtCentre contemporary art center.