“These works are all about the war,” Maria Filimonova, who helped organize Mriya Gallery’s showing at the Ukrainian Pavilion at Volta, told me as we toured the exhibition on opening night this Wednesday, September 4. She paused for a long moment. “Sorry,” she said, shook her head, and continued. “And this painting is by Dmitry Yevsieiev …”
Take a hard left from the crowd that greets you at the fair’s 28th Street entrance, walk down a tight corridor with booths on both sides, keep going, and eventually, you’ll find yourself in an airier space. On the walls is work by artists from Ukraine and its diaspora, presented by Kyiv-based galleries the Naked Room and Dymchuk; Ya Gallery in Lviv; Los Angeles-based Art Axcess, Lisbon-based Perve, and Mriya and Black & White in New York. Ola Rondiak’s large-scale Montanka (2024) sculptures, inspired by Ukrainian rag dolls symbolizing fortune and created in collaboration with Bohdan Kryvoshyya and a team of artisans, stand guard in the corner.
Volta is now in its 16th edition; this year’s fair features more than 50 exhibitors across five continents and 18 countries and hundreds of works on view for a $36 ticket through September 8. This iteration of the contemporary art show, however, is the first to include a pavilion dedicated to a particular region, nation, or group.
“I call it a ‘pavilion,’ somewhat pretentiously,” Lee Cavaliere, who was appointed artistic director of Volta last summer, told me. “It’s a bit more like a biennale: an exhibition of what’s happening in Ukrainian art right now.”
Volta also holds a yearly fair in Basel, Switzerland. Why a pavilion here, and not there? “In Europe, we’re closer to Ukraine,” Cavaliere said. “I think we understand it a bit more. Ukraine was invaded, and my gas prices went up. I think it’s more useful here.”
Gallerists seemed to confirm this sentiment. “It’s important, being here, in New York,” Filimonova confirmed to me. “It means a lot.”
The significance of a sponsor also can’t be understated. Volta partnered with Razom, a New York-based nonprofit dedicated to supporting Ukraine, to invite these galleries; none of them paid to be here, and the fair is not earning a profit off the pavilion. While Cavaliere is planning on centering other regions, groups, or denominations in future iterations of Volta, we are unlikely to see a Gazan or Sudanese Pavilion with such a model, which relies heavily on external sources of funding.
The Naked Room’s showing is one of the strongest at the pavilion. Kinder Album’s grotesquely moving trio of ceramic sculptures recall flesh melted into metal supports — strange creatures that seem poised to scuttle off on uncertain appendages. Kseniya Bilyk’s textile work of loosely interconnected rhomboids was inspired by the tiled flooring of structures like hospitals, their frayed edges a moving stand-in for a much more devastating order of destruction.
This pavilion isn’t just about the art, but also the community around it. As Maria Lanko, co-founder of the Naked Room and co-curator of the Ukrainian Pavilion in the last Venice Biennale, started to walk me around her gallery’s portion of the exhibition, a pair of women, gushing in quick Ukrainian, swept her away, one of them clutching a book entitled Russian Colonialism 101.
“It’s a small world,” Lia Snisarenko, founder of Art Axcess, who is showing the Lviv-based surrealist painter Feros, confirmed to me.
Equally as notable as the Ukrainian art community present at this New York fair are those who couldn’t make it. Enigmatic nudes of women ensconced in dream-like landscapes by the artist duo Synchrodogs adorn the walls dedicated to Dymchuk gallery, but Maxim Kovalchuk, the gallerist, isn’t here. He is of fighting age, and there’s a war going on.
