EXHIBITION: PAVLO KOVACH ‘HOC EST CORPUS MEUM’
Can art change anything, or is it merely a symbolic gesture in the face of the real experience of violence and loss?
OPENING: 20/03/2026, 19:00
CURATORIAL TOUR of the exhibition: 21/03.2026, 16:00
Curator: Paweł Korbus
Pavel Kovach’s project emerges at the intersection of two realities: art and the direct experience of war. The artist, who is currently performing military service, works with materials directly connected to the front line: artefacts, documents, and belongings of the fallen, the wounded, and the missing. In his works, art serves as a tool to document and symbolically structure traumatic experiences.
The exhibition ‘Hoc Est Corpus Meum’ brings together works created before the full-scale russian invasion of Ukraine and works created while the artist was already on military duty.
The exhibition title evokes a passage from the Eucharistic Prayer, ‘This is my body’, whose popular-culture travesty – ‘hocus-pocus’ – is recognised as a magical spell. In this context, the question of the agency of language and image arises: can art change anything, or is it merely a symbolic gesture in the face of the real experience of violence and loss?
The minimalist, often conceptual form of the works contrasts with their semantic weight. One of the installations, created from casts of the actual insoles of fallen soldiers, forms a map of scattered burial sites and a symbolic gesture of renewed ‘gathering’ of split bodies. Untitled installation (Bay leaf) rewrites the symbol of triumph into the statistics of war losses through casualty notification numbers. In other works, the artist uses elements of wartime reality such as glass shards left after explosions, items from military posts, or materials documenting loss.
An important strand of the exhibition is the tension between document and metaphor. Installations containing soil, water, salt, or wax examine how time and memory operate, while performances reveal the author’s double identity – soldier and artist. The exhibition becomes both an archive and a symbolic monument in which the materiality of everyday things preserves a record of the experience of violence, loss, and memory.
Pavlo Kovach (b. 1987, Uzhhorod, Ukraine) – graduate of the A. Erdeli Uzhhorod Art College (2005) and the Lviv National Academy of Arts (2011). Gaude Polonia scholar of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Poland (2012). Award winner of the MUHi competition (2012) and the IN OUT Festival (Gdańsk, 2018). Co-founder of the Efremova26 (Lviv, 2013) and Detenpyla (Lviv, 2013) galleries. Since 2012, he has been a founder and member of Open Group, which received the Main PinchukArtCentre Prize (2015) and a Special Mention at the Allegro Prize in Warsaw (2020). Open Group curated the Ukrainian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and represented the Polish Pavilion at the Biennale in 2024, curated by Marta Czyż. He lives and works in Lviv. Since 2023, he has served in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
The exhibition is part of the project ‘Art Practices in Wartime’.