Check the upcoming local events and activities
Day 1 | 22 May
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“Not My Room” is a sensitive yet intense exploration of the experience of losing one’s home and the fragility of personal space. At the core of the project is the condition of forced displacement, where familiar boundaries of privacy collapse and the body becomes the only point of support. Ralko’s works speak of vulnerability and anxiety, a sense of alienation, and the gradual search for a new place—both physical and internal.
Exhibition curator Maryna Hutz.
Vlada Ralko (b. 1969, Kyiv) is a Ukrainian artist whose work explores the human body, identity, and the political condition through a feminist lens. Working across painting, drawing, and mixed media, she examines the fragile boundary between inner experience and external reality, especially in times of social upheaval and war. A graduate of the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (1994), Ralko has exhibited internationally and received the HeForShe: Women in Arts Award (2019) and the Order for Intellectual Courage (2021). She lives and works between Kyiv and Berlin.
Marina Hutz is a Ukrainian curator, and founder of the Shcherbenko Art Centre (2009) in Kyiv, co-founder of the PROMIN' festival (2025). Her work focuses on developing and promoting contemporary Ukrainian art both locally and internationally, with a strong emphasis on supporting emerging artists and fostering cross-cultural dialogue. She is also the founder of the MUHi (Young Ukrainian Artists Competition) (2009) and actively works on international cultural projects, exhibitions, and collaborations across Europe.
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The near future. A Ukrainian space trucker, Andriy Melnyk, transports nuclear waste on the cargo ship to the abandoned Jupiter's moon Callisto. During his routine flight, the Earth explodes, but Andriy manages to survive. Andriy becomes the last person in the universe until French woman Catherine calls him from the faraway space station. Andriy decides to see her despite all the obstacles.
Day 2 | 23 May
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We invite you to take part in the performance “Walking Out the Wound” by Ukrainian artist Mariia Proshkovska and become a co-creator of the work.
Participants will be invited to walk a route defined by the artist for 60 minutes. Please bring a bottle of water and wear comfortable shoes. The event will take place as part of the PROMIN’ Festival of Contemporary Ukrainian Culture.
Meeting point at Koepelplein 1b, 2031 WL Haarlem, near De Koepel
In the project “Walking Out the Wound,” movement becomes a method of experiencing and gradually working through trauma. Step by step, the body enters into dialogue with space — urban and natural, external and internal. Routes transform into maps of memory, where the personal becomes visible and shared. The performance exists at the intersection of bodily practices, psychogeography, and everyday aesthetics. It is a process in which space becomes a witness, and movement becomes a gesture of externalizing and transforming experience. Within the project, the artist walks routes in different cities and countries, inviting others to join. These movements are recorded using GPS, creating digital maps that are later materialized as embroidered objects. A video essay brings these layers together — steps, sounds, textures — into a unified artistic experience.
Maria Proshkovska ia a conceptual and socially engaged artist working through a feminist lens. Her practice explores memory, trauma, post-traumatic growth, and gender-related social issues. Using her own body as a primary medium, she treats it as a central tool for expression and investigation. Her work is grounded in feminist perspectives, manual labor, and historical contexts, often integrating the local environment as an essential component. Through her practice, she examines the relationship between the individual body and its performative role in both shaping and responding to social change, emphasizing the connection between personal experience and broader societal transformation.
She holds an LLB from the Kyiv National University of Internal Affairs of Ukraine and an MA in Performance: Society from Central Saint Martins College (UAL), graduating with Distinction. She is also a fellow of the Women in Conflict 1325 Fellowship Programme (Scotland, UK, 2022).
Free entrance
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Keeping schools open in Ukraine is an attempt to recreate at least some of the normal life they had before the war — until February 24, 2022 (and in some regions even earlier, in 2014). Without interviews, narration and reenactments, TIMESTAMP provides an insight into how the war is affecting the daily lives of students and teachers. The film has a mosaic-like structure: it explores how a school func-tions in-person and online in these terrible times, both on and off the frontline, how day-to-day life is intertwined with constant danger.
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“Additional Scenes” by Yarema Malashchuk & Roman Khimei, followed by an Artist Talk with the filmmakers
Can a soldier return to civilian life — even just to play it?
In Additional Scenes, artists Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei follow Ukrainian actor Pavlo Aldoshyn, who once starred in the film Sniper: The White Raven about the war in Donbas. Now a soldier himself, Pavlo returns from the frontlines to Kyiv — not for rest, but to act again.
The camera captures his attempt to re-enter everyday life by performing it as a role. Watching people go about their routines, he seems like a visitor from a different reality. Civilian life no longer feels natural — it must be imitated.
The work challenges us to rethink the binary of civilian vs military. In Ukraine, soldiers are teachers, artists, filmmakers — people like us, who made a choice. How do we relate to them? What does normality mean in a time of war?
Stay after the screening for a conversation with the artists.
Free entrance
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One year before the Soviet Union collapses. Kira (17 y.o) is stepping out of her adolescence into adult life at the very same moment as Ukraine steps out of Soviet slavery
into the unknown. Together they will try all kinds of things for the first time – funny, dangerous, rebellious – as every teenager does.
Just as her parents' marriage falls apart and her Motherland faces the abrupt challenge of reformation, Kira must step into a new world of adolescence and face the crumbling of her childhood. Kira has to grow up briskly, learning to through her own decisions and mistakes, getting rid of childish illusions.
“Mom, dad, Universe – do you love me still, and if you do, why is it all happening to us?” – seems to be a real question Kira keeps asking. As a young adult, she makes her first clumsy attempts to find an adult love too. No matter what happens, we under stand that her carefree childhood is over, making room for a new challenge and adventure called life.
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Presentation of the publishing house “Who Is It?” (Хто це?): An independent Ukrainian publisher focused on contemporary literature that fosters critical thinking, reflection, and engagement with complex social and personal themes. The publishing house highlights texts that address identity, experience, and inner transformation.
Free entrance
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Best-friends Cuba and Alaska, wisecracking medics on Ukraine’s frontline, live the same battlefield story as
all soldiers: the longer they stand up for Ukraine, the more they lose contact with friends, family and their
previous lives. With war so deeply rooted in them, can they ever go back to the life they used to know?
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The protagonist Andrii Dovzhenko finds out a horrible truth, that has been hidden in USSR for years - most of those accused of «anti-Soviet propaganda» were never sent to prison, but to special psychiatric hospitals with a diagnosis of "slow progressive schizophrenia". Andrii finds himself in a real hell of punitive psychiatry and faces a difficult choice - to cooperate with the KGB and return to his family, or to reveal the truth about dissidents tortured in such psychiatric hospitals.
Day 3 | 24 May
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The project is based on the artist’s original method — Actor’s Meditation, which Buryachkova developed through her work with actors as a film director and screenwriter. This practice is a guided emotional journey that helps uncover hidden layers of experience, release suppressed emotions, and discover tools for inner support.
The process will be filmed by a camera inside the space and streamed onto screens in the exhibition hall. Visitors become witnesses to these intimate acts of transformation — or may enter the space and become participants in the performance themselves.
Everyone can choose their role: to remain an observer or to become a participant in this emotional journey.
Performance languages: English and Ukrainian.
Free entrance
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Join us for a screening of contemporary video works by Ukrainian artists, followed by an artist talk. The program brings together works that explore memory, presence, and lived experience, reflecting on personal and collective realities shaped by ongoing social and political conditions. Through different visual languages and approaches, the artists engage with themes of visibility, absence, and resilience. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the artists, offering insight into their practices, the contexts of the works, and the ideas behind them.
Marina Talutto and Alona Naumenko "Inconvenient People". Two black dressed Ladies in the middle of the promenade of a resort town cause surprise and captivate the eyes of people who are resting. Two women in black have expressions of longing. This longing and detachment from the context of people resting on the beach
appeals to the events in Ukraine, where fear and uncertainty about the future are raging. The woman in black, as a symbol of anxiety over the war in Ukraine, she feels loneliness and constant anxiety. She is physically in the center of resort life, but mentally with her country and family.
Maria Proshkovska "Still Here". Working with time, materiality, and memory, in the documentation of the performance Maria invites the viewer to reflect on the (im)possibility of returning to a “blank page.” The recorded action shows the artist gradually filling the surface of the paper, centimeter by centimeter, with a simple pencil, while the audience is offered a choice — to leave a trace on the paper or only in memory. The repetitive cycle of drawing and erasing, captured in the documentation, unfolds as a bodily practice of existing within the tension between remembering and forgetting, between preservation and loss.
Zoia Laktionova "We Have Never Met". An attempt by the director to delve into the nature of sexuality and relationships with her friend in order to understand what their experience together was for them.
Maria Stoianova, "Forest, Forest". Фільм «Ліс, ліс» Марії Стоянової побудований на домашніх відео української родини (2002–2008) і через їхню повсякденність досліджує відчуття спільності, пам’яті та тяглості. Поєднуючи моменти приватного життя з історичними відголосами, робота розкриває, як формуються зв’язки — через мову, символи та чуттєвий досвід. Використовуючи різні стратегії роботи з відео, художниця балансує між означенням і невимовним, пропонуючи глядачеві відчути «разом» як щось водночас назване і прожите.
Free entrance
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The near future. A Ukrainian space trucker, Andriy Melnyk, transports nuclear waste on the cargo ship to the abandoned Jupiter's moon Callisto. During his routine flight, the Earth explodes, but Andriy manages to survive. Andriy becomes the last person in the universe until French woman Catherine calls him from the faraway space station. Andriy decides to see her despite all the obstacles.
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Amidst the maelstrom of war in Ukraine, three drag queens -Diva Monroe, Marlene, and Aura- refuse to abandon their homeland. Instead of fleeing, they choose to fight: for freedom, the LGBTQ+ community, and their very existence. From the glamour of the show to the brutality of war, the film follows their lives - filled with loss, fear, as well as indomitable courage. Marlen grapples with old wounds, Diva Monroe finds herself once more, and Aura fights for a place both in the army and onto the stage. A charity drag show they organize to support Ukraine turns into a symbol of unity and resilience. The film is a story of self- discovery, love, hope, and the power to find joy even in the darkest of times.
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Despite the deep traces of trauma caused by sexual violence and torture resulting from Russian aggression, Ukrainian women survivors are uniting to break stigma and silence, transforming their testimonies into a powerful form of resistance.
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February 23, 2022, a small town near Kyiv. Taras (35) and Olia (32) spend the first night in their new apartment. At dawn, they wake up from the explosions. They fail to leave the town on time, meanwhile, the Russian troops arrange headquarters in their building. The couple finds themselves trapped in their flat with no electricity, water, and mobile connection. For the next 5 days, Taras and Olia will explore the black abyss of real intimacy between two people and face crucial existential questions in mortal danger.