EXHIBITION: KATYA LIBKIND. “TO DESPAIR – TO LOOK”

Curator: Ewa Chacianowska

„To despair – To look”, an individual exhibition by Ukrainian artist Katya Libkind, highlights the central role of the body, sensuality, the intimacy of trauma, and memory in her artistic practice, understood as essential to the process of working through bodily and psychological wounds.

The narratives constructed within the exhibition do not form a linear story. Instead, they unfold as dreamlike yet powerful images of the contemporary moment. Drawing on memory, Libkind creates worlds suspended between dream and reality. Her sensory scenographies are filled with uncanny objects and visual metaphors, in which everything returns to the body, to the wound, and to the need for genuine sensation and authentic experience in the face of the ongoing war in Ukraine.

This is Katya Libkind’s first solo exhibition in Poland. However, audiences of the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok have previously encountered her work in the group exhibitions “Observe This Moment – How It Convulses” (2024) and “Common Landscape / Greeting a Stranger” (2025).

Katya Libkind was born in Vladivostok and lives and works in Kyiv. She graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv in 2016. Her practice spans graphic art, painting, sculpture, installation, film, and land art. She has collaborated as a curator with The Naked Room gallery in Kyiv and with the Khanenko Museum in Kyiv. She served as artistic director of the operas “Bread, Salt, Sand, My Treacherous Light and Limb“, staged by the Ukho music agency between 2016 and 2019. From 2016 to 2019 she also worked with Ukho as a scenographer, including on the concert series Voice Architecture. She is a recipient of the Gaude Polonia scholarship awarded by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2020). From 2017 until the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she participated annually in the Mohrytsia Land Art symposia held in the village of Mohrytsia in Ukraine’s Sumy region. She is a member and co-founder of the Montage artistic collective, as well as of atelienormalno, a Kyiv-based studio for artists with and without Down syndrome, which in 2025 participated in the exhibition “Common Landscape / Greeting a Stranger” at the Arsenal Gallery Power Plant in Białystok. A year earlier, Libkind took part in the group exhibition “Observe This Moment – How It Convulses” at the same venue.