“I’ll Trust You If You’re a Woman” solo show Dasha Super
According to Dasha, Madonna has already provided a comprehensive answer to the exhibition’s theme in her song “What It Feels Like for a Girl.”
“Girls can wear jeans and have short haircuts.
Wear shirts and boots, because it’s okay to be a boy, but looking like a boy when you’re a girl is humiliating.
Because you think being a girl is humiliating, but secretly you’d like to know what it’s like, wouldn’t you?
What does it feel like to be a girl...
The exhibition features works from a series of ceramics the artist has been working on for the past three years.
The central image, which the artist transfers onto plates and household objects, consists of photographs she produced of men dressed in a uniform style.
The exhibition and part of the display were curated by Danylo Pavliy.
Oleksii Minko Residency at thesteinstudio
Throughout the month at thesteinstudio, Oleksii Minko will examine his personal desires in relation to the desires of the Ukrainian state and society. Taking into account the specific entanglement of pleasure and guilt within a country at war, Minko will turn to his own modesty and shamelessness in order to ask what freedom might mean in his particular case. In this process, he will expose the privileges through which he avoids responsibility.
The works created by Oleksii Minko during the residency revolve around attempts—most of them unsuccessful—to recover the pleasure associated with the feeling of freedom. In a society living through a full-scale invasion, freedom itself is put under constant strain. The forced mobilization of men, the militarization of public life, and the narrowing of what is considered permissible are only some of the ways in which the relationship to freedom has become increasingly complicated by new notions of justice, accompanied by feelings of responsibility, guilt, and shame.
During the residency, Minko returns to a period in his life when he felt capable of defying both familial and social expectations. He searches for a familiar sense of pleasure within the irresponsibility afforded by childhood, yet now confronts it through another form of irresponsibility—that associated with an adult man avoiding military conscription.
Together with curator and artist Katia Libkind, the artist created unfinished cardboard figures of children incorporating his own hair. These “dolls” appear in a video work where, depending on the accompanying soundtrack, they can be perceived as children with disabilities—similar to those he works with at a school in order to qualify for a deferment from military service—as manifestations of his own childhood conflict between external expectations and personal desires, or as mutilated soldiers, whether Russian or Ukrainian, their identity remaining deliberately ambiguous.
Film scholar Volodymyr Prylutskyi accompanied the residency with a screening and presentation of Rock n Ball, a film in which Oleksii Minko appeared as a child. Following that experience, Minko developed what he describes as an erotic relationship with the camera, later using it to film himself during intimate sexual experiments involving a soft toy.
Also present in the exhibition space is camouflage-coloured slime. It spreads across the floor like a viscous mass resembling either mucus or semen. The slime functions as an anti-stress object—another means of escaping responsibility. It was produced with the assistance of the artist’s wife, artist Iryna Loskot.
Oleksii Minko works across context-specific and autofictional performance, video, and text. In spring 2026, he completes his MA in Philosophy in Kyiv. He also holds a degree in Puppet Theatre Acting and Amateur Ensemble Direction. Alongside his artistic practice, he works as an art critic and teaching assistant. He has participated in Ukrainian and international residencies, exhibitions, and conferences.
Minko is a member of The Musical Collective, the research group Occupational Formations: Infrastructures of the Seen and Unseen, and the duo The Schmidts.
Residency curated by Katya Libkind.
“Flagrante. A Map of Tenderness” solo show Yaryna Fedoriv
April 10 — 26, 2026
The exhibition by Yaryna Fedoriv presents a series of engraved glass goblets created during the winter period in Kyiv.
The title Flagrante derives from the Latin expression in flagrante delicto (“in the act,” “caught red-handed”) — a legal term referring to being apprehended in the very moment of committing an act, or witnessing something concealed.
Over the past years, the artist has been working with a rare traditional Italian technique of wheel engraving on glass. Her practice focuses on transparency, reflection, and fragile modes of image-making.
In this project, Fedoriv constructs her own “country of tenderness” — a speculative model of an alternative domesticity. In contrast to the lived conditions of cold, darkness, the hum of generators, candlelight, layers of thermal clothing, and exhaustion, the work proposes a space where even the slightest trace of suffering is absent.
“I addressed my love to a world I never belonged to: I wrote it my glass letters, but the past never responds, and so this love remains unrequited. I wandered through rose gardens, overheard serenades beneath balconies, witnessed secret meetings by night gates or fountains. Their suffering was tender and pure, passionate and devoted. The landscapes — far removed from reality,” says the artist.
“For everyone on the mainland”
Curators: Vitalii Matukhno, Volodymyr Prylutskyi.
The author of the texts is an anonymous resident of Donetsk Oblast under the pseudonym Hanna Smilka.
The everyday experiences of people living under occupation are rarely represented in the public sphere. Not the language of resistance or the generalized image of "life under pressure," but daily reality: everyday life, fear, adaptation, silence, internal compromises. These testimonies do not fit into the usual framework and therefore rarely become visible.
On November 9, 2023, an anonymous blog by an author under the pseudonym Hanna Smilka, who is still in occupied Donetsk region, began its work. In it, the author describes the reality of occupied Donetsk, documenting her daily life and the reality of the occupation administrations, propaganda mechanisms, and the impact of the prolonged Russian occupation on local residents, sharing her observations.
By creating an exhibition from Hanna's texts, we are trying to recreate the author's physical presence on the "mainland," in the country's capital. We see this as an act of solidarity for all those who are forced to endure and adapt to the reality of living under Russian occupation.
(Almost) personal exhibition
"Halo" by Tamara Turliun
at thesteinstudio
September 12 - 29, 2025
The exhibition is centered on a dialog between the works of Tamara Turliun and her friend, referred to in the texts as "P.". In her studio, the artist found P.'s drawings created in different years. Looking through them, the author felt the influence of her friend on her own practice. After P.'s departure, communication between them gradually disappeared.
The exhibition "Halo" is an attempt to reveal the connection between the two artists. The title refers to the atmospheric phenomenon of halo, a secondary glow that forms around a light source in the form of a circle, ring, or arc. For Tamara Turlyun, this optics becomes a metaphor for friendship: in the relationship between friends, each was both a source and a continuation of the other's light.
“Tastes Like the Sea” Exhibition by Marharyta Polovinko, Curated by Ivanna Kozachenko
About a year ago, we began organizing a solo exhibition for Marharyta Polovinko in the studio space. On April 6, we received the heartbreaking news that Marharyta had died while defending Ukraine. In her honor, we have decided to dedicate the time originally allocated for her exhibition to her memory.
At the end of the month, the studio will be open for gatherings in memory of Margarita, as well as presenting of one of her student works. The project's curator, Ivanna, will be present in the studio at all times, along with a drinking fountain and food for dogs and cats.
The poster for the exhibition was created by Marharytas friend, the artist Ilya Todurkin.
Soft pink matter
Artist Nina Laguta
Curator: Anastasia Garazd
Nina Laguta’s solo exhibition “Soft pink matter” at thesteinstudio focuses on the artist’s personal reflections on existence in a body that is socially defined as feminine.
The exhibition is based on the idea of a living and vulnerable body that can be observed from the inside. The artist explores the body as a field of self-knowledge and as an object of external, socio-cultural gaze.
Using textiles, sculpture and installation, the artist examines a corporeality that refuses to be fully human, understandable or controlled. It becomes hybrid and capable of combining the incompatible, being permeable, aggressive, controlled and at the same time autonomous.
Nina Laguta (born 1994, Nova Kakhovka) is a multidisciplinary artist who mainly works with ceramics and textiles. In her works, she explores how trauma unfolds through the physical and mental body, thus revealing the fragility of human existence. The main themes of her practice are the exploration of the sensual side of life and the archaeology of memory. She lives and works in Kyiv.
Jan Dzheyran
Artist Diana Khalilova
Project curator: Valeria Nasedkina
The exhibition-dating “Jan Dzheyran” at thesteinstudio explores family memory and self-identification at the intersection of cultural and political contexts.
The author of the project, Diana Khalilova, was born in the North Caucasus, but as a child, due to the historical shifts of the 20th century, she found herself with her family in the Dnieper. Her family belongs to the Rutul people, one of the small ethnic groups whose representatives are scattered throughout the territories of the post-Soviet space. The 2001 Ukrainian census recorded only 139 Rutuls, mainly in Donetsk, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk regions and the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.
The title of the exhibition “Jan Dzheyran” comes from the affectionate address that her mother used to call the artist in her childhood. “Dzheyran” is a type of gazelle found in the Caucasus and some regions of Asia. This series tells about forgetting the mother tongue and inventing ways to remember it, about endangered species and their introduction, about beautiful beliefs that are overshadowed by an ugly reality.
“Jan Dzheyran” is an attempt to collect and preserve what is still left: words, images, gestures, memories. It is a tribute to parents who taught us to cherish the memory of our native land in their own special ways. All the works in the exhibition were made in collaboration with other family members – mother, father, younger brother.
Examining an ant's burrow before the rain
Artists: Marko Zaliznyak, Yana Kononova, Mykhailo Koptiev, Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Himey, Oleksiy Minko
Curators: Oleksandra Pogrebnyak and Dmytro Chepurnyi
The exhibition “Considering an Ant’s Nest Before the Rain” is dedicated to the relationship between modernization and processes of homelessness, highlighting how large-scale engineering and geopolitical projects transform not only space but also the very possibility of subjectivity.
In the summer of 2021, the Pokrovsky Historical Museum [the museum building was demolished in the winter of 2025] opened an exhibition of the same name dedicated to working with archives. It included photographs by Pokrovsky’s genius loci, photographer Mark Zaliznyak. In the early 1930s, he participated in expeditions to the Dnieper rapids under the leadership of Dmitry Yavornytsky, whose goal was to preserve the memory of the landscape before it was flooded due to the construction of a hydroelectric power station. Today, we turn to this exhibition again, but not to reproduce it. Rather, we seek to reinterpret it in the context of our contemporary experience, where changed conditions and new realities place the subject once again in the position of an ant before the rain. How can we rediscover or affirm individual freedom and subjectivity in the face of potential catastrophe?
Exhibition presentation after a month-long solo residency Olga Marusyn
Olga Marusyn is a Ukrainian artist and performer. Her focus is on themes of personal mythology, memory, copying, and repetition. The artist is interested in the temporal and relational dimensions of art, especially the politics of the process of producing an artwork. Marusyn uses a range of media, including text, video, choreography, graphics, and installation. She is a member of the performance group Abstract Finger (Pointing to Nothing) and The Musical Collective.
During her residency at thesteinstudio, Olga will work with a fantasy about an artist’s studio and continue her experiments with materials. Among them is raw material – salt water, which the artist extracts near her hometown of Lanchyn, Ivano-Frankivsk region.
A few kilos of exhibitions
Artist: Stanislav Turina
Curator: Kateryna Yakovlenko
An exhibition by artist Stanislav Turina, which includes a moving or changing exhibition. The presented works touch on the themes of memory, the value of art - both in times of war and in societies that find themselves on the periphery. Actually, this exhibition is about the periphery: attention, things, knowledge, experiences, people. Each of the presented works and series at the exhibition is simultaneously connected and not connected to each other.
"In this exhibition, attention and presence become important; and things that had nothing to do with everyday wartime life are burdened with anxiety and a sense of inevitability. Here is a person next to you - and he is gone. People die both from war and not from war. This is the only list that is replenished with names and is stored in a desk drawer that is not locked. But despite this, not everyone has access to it. The memory of time, of cities, and of people who were here and are still present is what remains in us," - from the curatorial text by Kateryna Yakovlenko.
Stanislav Turina is a songwriter, inclusion researcher, artist, and volunteer. He is interested in disability issues, the history of psychiatry, mountains, world cuisine, the relationships between different languages, rehabilitation, and human rights.
Turina was born in 1988 in the city of Makiivka, Donetsk region. Due to health reasons, he was forced to leave Donetsk region in 1993; he grew up in Transcarpathia in the city of Mukachevo. He studied at the Lviv Academy of Arts, Faculty of Art Glass. He participated in the projects of Galeria Detenpula, Galeria Jefremowa 26. He was a member of the Open Group. Turina is a co-founder and co-curator of the project ateliernormalno for artists for artists with and without Down syndrome. He lives and works in Kyiv.
*Several changes of expositions are planned within the framework of the exhibition
Chips: Ukrainian Naïve Mosaics
Yevgen Nikiforov
Opening of the exhibition showcasing part of the photo archive of Ukrainian mosaics collected by photographer Yevgen Nikiforov between 2013 and 2023, and published in the book Chips: Ukrainian Naïve Mosaics, 1950-90, co-authored with art historian Polina Baytsim
The exhibition expands the collection of the photo book of the same name, addressing mosaics found in passing, but centered deliberately - in the case of another discoverer, they would have remained at the "bottom of the pack".
The exhibition focuses on the practices of archiving practices, which also change, layering: the impossibility of restoring the names of the mosaic authors transforms into a record of their work, and the destruction of Ukrainian spaces transforms into a photographic record of love and attachment to them.
The exhibition will run from November 7 to 19.
The exhibition project is organized by
ist publishing in cooperation with the
Goethe-Institut in Ukraine.
C.D - chorna dira (black hole in English)
in the meeting with a c.d“chorna dira” o b.h. (black hole in English) - (UNFINISHED: under development) a plaster frame-by-frame animation, a story about how the street started to get sick with black holes. people in the meeting with them - irreversibly changed (mutated/ got sick);
and one of the most dangerous effects of coexistence with a hole nearby was the disappearance of people (which was happening more and more often)
- encounters with the unknown/unclear/unspoken/unphrased/emptiness that needs to be filled
-about the disappeared, taken away, those who did not return, those who are escaping, "vanished" (as Marharyta Polovinko says), "beaten people" (as Dana Kavelina says)
-a story that emerged after (and about) forced mobilisation, about "fortune's mistress, who bends down from her kiss on the lips" (as Ilya Todurkin said)
in the meeting with c.d (chechushka dasha) - creation of a situation (residence): a workshop at thesteinstudio, where the work in the meeting with b.d. (black hole) began, which is presented in the "workinprogress" stage: with notes, storyboards, personal belongings of the artist, other works of artists, notebooks-diaries. Each day, a slab of the last frame was left, gradually filling the floor of the room, the places where "someone once was", eventually forming an installation - "memorial slabs to no one" (from the concrete poetri series).
Katya Liebkind
Katya Libkind's project "It Would Be Better If It Hadn't Been Like This" at thesteinstudio is the artist's first solo exhibition in Ukraine. It will present all of Libkind's works from her artistic practice that have been found - paintings, graphics, ceramics, audio with dreams, parts left over from installations, attempts to create clothing and accessories, video works on a projector, photo-video archives and recreated land art. Fragments of projects that, for one reason or another, did not happen will also be presented.
In her practice, the artist turns to deep introspection and contemplation of her own environment. Her works are based on radical sincerity and direct emotional experience. Libkind raises questions about personal and generally accepted boundaries and views, normality and beauty. The works are often based on or inspired by contradictions and doubts, and a separate source of search for the author is the space of dreams.
All the exhibits presented at the exhibition are inextricably linked to each other. One of the exhibits is a list of artists, curators, and curators who influenced the author’s work, or a fountain of the artist’s own blood. Liebkind says that the exhibition is “a mass of bodies with a literal circulatory system” and that “it couldn’t be better.”
Katya Liebkind is a Ukrainian artist, co-founder and member of ateliernormalno, a workshop for artists with and without Down syndrome. She was a member of the group “Montage” and the curatorial team of the cultural platform “Plivka”. She created scenography for musical performances and speeches with the “Ukho” agency. Her main media are graphics, installation, and video.
solo show Katy lesiv
One day I bought an unbloomed white peony from an older woman at the market. As it blossomed, it became remarkably showy and beautiful. Then, on May 24th, I bought another unbloomed peony from the same woman and put them in two glasses of water side by side. The first one kept unfurling its petals with each passing hour, while the second had just begun unfolding its petals. The next day, they were equally showy and beautiful. Two days later, the first peony withered while the second remained showy and beautiful.
– Katya Lesiv
I love you, a photographic project by artist Katya Lesiv, is about stages of maturity and about appreciating their natural manifestations. It serves as a documentary account, illustrating how the rhythms of life overlap for two particular peonies. By exploring the cyclical nature of every living being, death emerges as an inevitable and uncontrollable aspect. Through examining the completion of this cycle, it became evident to Lesiv that none of the different stages of life have ever been under human control.
The original medium of I love you is an art book published in 2020, a collaboration with IST Publishing in Ukraine. The book allows the project to find intimate contact with individuals, finding its place in every unique space where it is situated. For the first time, I love you is presented as an exhibition in Hippolyte Studio with black and white photographic works and text. The documentation of peony flowering is complemented by an imaginary dialogue between two fictional characters.
"There's no more mail. A car comes once a week."
Curator Milena Khomchenko
Artist Lada Verbina
Artist Lada Verbina's solo exhibition "The Post Office is Gone. A Car Comes Once a Week" at thesteinstudio gallery tells the story of belonging to a place, especially relevant during a full-scale invasion. The exhibition will include paintings, videos, and created objects that tell the story of organic disappearance, which occurs in parallel with the deliberate destruction of our land, our history, and our future by the Russian occupiers.
The leading theme of Lada Verbina's practice is memory, recollections, and archiving the past; the artist often works with food, in particular the image of bread. Thus, the main characters of the exhibition become walnuts — a central element of local traditions and rituals, buttery rolls, earthen relief, and even coins from a swan piggy bank.
"The Post Office is Gone. “A car comes once a week” is a phrase that belongs to the residents of the village of Stara Huta, in the Khmelnytskyi region, where the artist’s grandmother lived. The artist watched as the village gradually disappeared – important infrastructure facilities were closed, young people left, and older people died. But nature leaves nothing empty and other objects are beginning to fill the space, and the cyclical nature of natural processes gives hope for revival.