Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk on Image-Making in Wartime

Why It Matters

The exhibition reframes war representation, urging audiences and creators to confront the limits of documentary truth in an era of livestreamed conflict. It signals a shift toward artistic strategies that blend critique, technology, and lived experience, influencing cultural discourse on warfare and media ethics.

Key Takeaways

• Four multi‑channel video works confront war’s visual politics.
• Artists invert necropolitics by staging Russian soldier bodies.
• Sleeping Ukrainian children shown without narrative critiques viewer gaze.
• Robotic dog avatar connects diaspora memory with battlefield technology.
• Kyiv’s everyday scenes reveal war’s forced normalization.

Pulse Analysis

Madrid’s "Pedagogies of War" situates contemporary Ukrainian art alongside historic anti‑war masterpieces such as Picasso’s Guernica and Goya’s Black Paintings, underscoring a lineage of visual resistance. By abandoning traditional documentary tactics, Khimei and Malashchuk foreground the impossibility of a single, truthful war image in today’s algorithm‑driven news feeds. Their installations employ silence, multi‑screen environments, and performative irony to expose how digital platforms both amplify and dilute the brutality of conflict, prompting viewers to reconsider their own role as passive consumers of war footage.

Each of the four works tackles a distinct facet of the modern battlefield. "The Wanderer" re‑appropriates circulating images of dead Russian soldiers, turning necropolitics into a personal, ironic performance. "You Shouldn’t Have to See This" presents sleeping Ukrainian children without narrative, forcing the audience to confront the desensitizing effect of endless scrolling. "Open World" merges diaspora displacement with military technology, using a robotic dog to create a livestream‑style homecoming that blurs the line between memory and surveillance. Finally, "We Didn’t Start This War" captures the paradox of normalcy in Kyiv, where everyday life coexists with perpetual danger, highlighting how war becomes woven into the fabric of civilian existence.

The broader implication for the art world and media studies is a redefinition of war storytelling. As livestreams and AI‑generated content dominate public perception, artists are compelled to adopt hybrid mediums that question authenticity, agency, and ethical responsibility. Khimei and Malashchuk’s approach demonstrates that art can serve as a critical lens, revealing the gaps left by conventional reporting and offering a space for reflective engagement. Their work suggests a future where artistic practice not only documents conflict but also actively reshapes the cultural vocabulary used to understand it.