The Ukrainian Museum presents the first North American museum exhibition of internationally acclaimed Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova, featuring five projects created since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Through personal experience, the artist explores displacement, resistance, and regeneration as forces that have reshaped the country’s landscapes, cities, and people.
In March 2022, Kadyrova and her partner and collaborator Denys Ruban were forced to leave Kyiv for a safer region, finding refuge in a village in Transcarpathia. Her early wartime projects were shaped by these conditions. A defining feature of Kadyrova’s practice is her use of a wide range of materials and media; in The Ground Shifts Beneath Our Feet, she works with materials that were immediately available, including river stones in Palianytsia, traditional village embroidered textiles in Anxiety, and mobile phone footage in Russian Rocket (2022–). For the video installation Forest (2023–2025) and the film IDP (2026), she also collaborated with professional videographers.
Although Kadyrova has returned to live and work in Kyiv, the five works in the exhibition reflect the ongoing condition in which Ukrainians have lived for more than four years — where survival requires constant adaptation and near-daily adjustment to new realities.
The exhibition is conceived by The Ukrainian Museum and Zhanna Kadyrova, and curated by the artist in collaboration with the Museum’s curatorial team, with contributions from Asha Bukojemsky.
The Ukrainian Museum