At the end of April, Artsvit Gallery’s collection curator Viktoriia Nikitina took part in a networking event for participants of the Museum Futures programme, within which we are developing a website dedicated to the gallery’s collection.

During the meeting, participants presented their institutions and projects, shared the challenges that arise when working with artistic and historical collections, and discussed possibilities for future partnerships and collaboration. A separate part of the event focused on group work around current issues of preserving, researching, and representing visual art collections.

On 24–25 April, Iryna Polikarchuk, director of the Artsvit Gallery, took part in the international interdisciplinary seminar ‘Culture Defence / Kultura Ochrony’, held in Lublin (Poland) as part of the European Capital of Culture Lublin 2029 programme, in collaboration with the Faculty of Pedagogy and Psychology at UMCS.

“The Museum of Forgetting” is a series of projects combining research with artistic expression. It focuses on forgetting as a counterform of memory: the repression of traumatic experiences, the conscious ‘purification’ of the unwanted, gradual disappearance through physical decay, or transformation dictated by the need for renewal. These processes are viewed as multidimensional — material, ideological, collective and personal, yet both mundane and tragic.

This will be the last day of the exhibition — a kind of finale and, at the same time, an opportunity to see the project and hear about it directly from its author. During the tour, the artist will guide visitors through the exhibition and talk about the ideas behind it, as well as his collaboration with Ukrainian artists, which has become an important part of this project.

We often talk about the Artsvit Gallery collection, and sometimes you can see its works at exhibitions in different cities of Ukraine and even abroad. However, most of the time it remains closed — not only to the general public, but also to the professional community.

That is why we want to change this: we are currently working on an online platform that will make our art collection visible and more accessible — for curators, artists, researchers, and viewers. The future website will make it easier to find works, research them, and discover new opportunities for creative collaboration.

The central motif of the Lviv part of the project, presented at Jam Factory Art Center, is the theme of loneliness and the relationship between the “I” and the “we” as shaped by the experience of war.

Artist Dasha Podoltseva and composer Olexiy Shmurak are working on the project “The Museum of Forgetting: Dnipro” at the Artsvit Gallery (March 26 — early May 2026). This exhibition will be based on personal stories related to Dnipro. We are interested in two aspects: desirable and undesirable forgetting.

Undesirable forgetting: stories about things that are being destroyed and forgotten, but that we would like to preserve.

Desirable forgetting: things that are firmly lodged in our memory, but that are unpleasant and that we would like to get rid of.

We look forward to seeing you at the exhibition project by Polish artist and curator Waldemar Tatarczuk, "When I Am in Ukraine, Everyone Asks Me About Poland. When I Am in Poland, Everyone Asks Me About Ukraine," which opened at the end of last year.

In 2025, Artsvit Gallery focused its attention on exhibition projects and representing artists, their art, and its own art collection. Educational projects for children, young people, and adults remained a constant focus for the institution. We held many public events, including artist talks, lectures, excursions, and numerous film screenings. Some of our ideas and projects remained unrealised: power outages caused by enemy shelling were and still are a major challenge for us. However, we continue to work and persevere, because together ♥

Tomorrow, December 23, is the last day to visit the exhibition "Dnipro. River of Memory" at the Experimental Studio of the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture. The project of Polish artist and curator Waldemar Tatarchuk "When I Am in Ukraine, Everyone Asks Me About Poland. When I Am in Poland, Everyone Asks Me About Ukraine" will continue into next year 2026, until March 14 inclusive.

This exhibition opens up to the Ukrainian audience the multifaceted creative identity of the Polish artist, whose practice has always unfolded performatively: from artistic to curatorial and organizational, and back to artistic. This conversation will discuss these life and artistic trajectories, which from the beginning were directed eastward and eventually led the author to the Dnipro.

Waldemar Tatarchuk never stopped being an artist, while at the same time serving as a gallery director for the past fifteen years. Although the focus of the exhibition is Tatarchuk's work and his collaboration with Ukrainian artists, his role as an "art bureaucrat" as director of the Labyrinth Gallery in Lublin is also highlighted.