Is it true that in times of war, all art must only revolve around life and death, balancing between the extremes of heroism, endurance, and the delicate line between survival and destruction? Ukrainian artist Kateryna Lysovenko boldly poses this question through her exhibition Vulnerability as Manifesto. She defies the expected wartime narratives and instead seeks to reclaim trust in a world fractured by tragedy and loss.

In her latest paintings, Lysovenko weaves her personal lore around the cycles of existence, revealing that birth and demise unfold together, entwined. Yet, amid this choreography of endings and beginnings, there are other forms of sensitivity: a realm of pleasure, longing, and the deep, instinctual desire to dissolve into the very fabric of life. The merging with the environment offers a new kind of materialization, one that extends the confines of the human body. Lysovenko advances this rhetorical search by shifting the focus beyond living beings. She extends subjectivity and the right to pleasure to the sea, trees, and other material forms of the natural world. 

This reimagining echoes folk tales, where transformation into a tree or a mermaid was not an act of dehumanization but a profound gesture of resistance against structural violence, a search for belonging in an impossible world. These new bodily forms dwell in utopian spaces where one is protected from the forces of fate and historical trauma. While the memory of those no longer among the living is preserved in archetypal visions, hope still flickers. From flesh and blood, children are born into our world of violence. Their arrival holds the power to dismantle the forces that seek to suppress life. An act of birth becomes a gentle promise of renewal and enduring presence.

For Lysovenko, this manifesto serves as a powerful tool for reclaiming avant-garde traditions and rediscovering one’s path towards the future. It is an invitation to feel, to be guided by sensation rather than rationalization.

– Oleksandra Pogrebnyak