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At the 59th Venice Biennale, Ukraine was represented by Pavlo Makov, an artist and academician of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine. He presented the project "Fountain of exhaustion".
22.12.2022
“I felt I’m not so much an artist, or an individual, so much as a citizen of Ukraine. I felt that Ukraine has to be represented.”
Pavlo Makov
Pavlo Makov, the official Ukrainian artist at the 59th Venice Biennale, has arrived in Italy to install his exhibition Fountain of Exhaustion – a pyramid of 78 bronze funnels set in tiers, through which water flows. The original idea came in 1995, when, owing to serious floods, the city of Kharkiv lost its water supply for several weeks.
Pavlo Makov's project "Fountain of exhaustion"
Pavlo Makov, an artist and academician of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine
Makov and his team, including the curator Maria Lanko, Lizaveta Herman and Borys Filonenko were determined, as said Pavlo, “to show that we are here, and we exist. I am not quoting Churchill directly, but he talked about the things that we are fighting for – and we are fighting for our culture, our way of seeing the world.”
The Acqua Alta project for the pavilion in Venice will become a culmination of the "fountain of exhaustion" image development that has been proceeding since the '90s. The artistic practices of Pavlo Makov in the early 1990s focused on exploring the parallels between the human body and urban space and have since then largely shifted to elaborating the theme of “the world without us”.
The artwork Fountain of Exhaustion is a serene and reflective project, which serves as a conscious extension of the original story of Fountain of Exhaustion (at once providing for the particularities of the exhibition location) and comes as a natural response to this year’s theme of La Biennale di Venezia – Milk of Dreams.
Venice Biennale 2022 is held from 23.04 - 27.11 2022