FOTODOK x WORM: What the Earth Holds – Soil as Witness in Ukrainian Contemporary Art
This is a public programme as part of the Fotodok x WORM exhibition "Radiations of War" by Yana Kononova.
Entrance is free, it takes place in the gallery so you can watch the exhibition and learn more about the Ukrainian culture.
About the lecture:
What does soil mean in a time of war? In this talk, we will explore how contemporary Ukrainian artists use earth – literally and symbolically – to speak about memory, loss, resistance, and care.
From personal gardens to mass graves, from occupied land to healing rituals, soil appears again and again as a powerful material in the face of destruction. Together, we will look at works by diverse contemporary Ukrainian artists, whose practices reveal how deeply land and identity are connected in Ukraine’s cultural and political landscape.
Whether you are new to Ukrainian art or just curious about how artists respond to crisis, this talk invites you to see the ground beneath our feet in a new way. The lecture takes place alongside Yana Kononova’s exhibition Radiations of War at WORM, creating space for reflection and shared attention to what the earth can hold.
About the lector:
Dasha Lohvynova is an independent art historian and researcher based in the Netherlands. She recently graduated from the Curating Art and Cultures programme at the University of Amsterdam. Born and raised in Ukraine, her research interests lie in exploring artistic and curatorial practices in the so-called region of Eastern Europe, with a specific focus on Ukraine and contemporary Ukrainian art. Through her work, Dasha aims to understand the correlation between current artistic practice and ongoing social transformations in post-Soviet spaces.
@fto_dasha
About the exhibition:
FOTODOK is proud to announce Yana Kononova‘s solo exhibition Radiations of War. In Kononova’s terms, war does not end when the noise of explosions fades. It lingers, saturating the land and embedding itself in the silence of devastated landscapes.
The Radiations of War project traces this persistence through Ukraine—not as a documentary record, but as an encounter with a terrain where disaster continues after impact, turning the land into both witness and archive. When the frontline recedes, the ruins left behind reflect a landscape in transformation, charged with that which has passed through it. Kononova’s images are evidence of this process, revealing how violence settles into the earth—lingering in the weight of absence. For the artist, the term ‘radiations’ evokes the composite, polluted nature of how war is experienced. It evokes more than the eye perceives: a hum or a tremor that alters our sense of space, that moves through memory, through the body, beyond the body, across generations. Here, war is neither an event nor a singular catastrophe but a process without end, radiating outward and rippling across the land.
