Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk. Pedagogies of War
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At a time when war has become omnipresent and increasingly mediated through screens, algorithms, and remote technologies that sever action from its consequences, the Museum and TBA21 present Pedagogies of War by Ukrainian artists Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk. Curated by Chus Martínez, the exhibition examines how violence reshapes perception, behavior, and collective life even before it can be fully named or understood. Anchored in TBA21’s long-term commitment to peace as a public and political condition, the exhibition approaches war not as an isolated event to depict, but as an operating system that structures reality, disciplines bodies, recalibrates attention, and almost imperceptibly permeates the fabric of everyday life.
Working with audiovisual material, the two artists—recent recipients of the Curatorial Prize at OFFSCREEN Paris—demonstrate how daily rhythms and democratic structures fracture under violence and material pressure. Pedagogies of War reminds us that the ecologies of conflict—political, emotional, and territorial—shape identity with the same force as geography.
The exhibition brings together four significant audiovisual works: the commission Open World (2025); You Shouldn’t Have to See This (2024), an earlier work by the artists; The Wanderer (2022), part of the TBA21 Collection; and a new commission specifically conceived for the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, We Didn’t Start This War (2026).
Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk have worked as filmmakers and visual artists since 2016, exploring the intersections between documentary and fiction to address Ukraine’s recent history and present. Their practice examines enduring post-imperial power structures and their impact on a new generation of Ukrainian citizens, caught between historical trauma and an uncertain future. Through multichannel video installations and cinematic narratives, they capture the fractured nature of reality, where collective memory and personal experience intertwine.
Khimei and Malashchuk received the main prize of the PinchukArtCentre Prize (2020) and the VISIO Young Talent Acquisition Prize (2021). Their most recent short film, Additional Scenes, won top honors at the Tallinn Black Nights IFF 2024 and the Ukrainian Film Critics Award. The duo has participated in the Future Generation Art Prize 2021, the 14th Baltic Triennial, the Gothenburg Biennial, and the Kyiv Biennial, as well as in group exhibitions at Haus der Kunst, Castello di Rivoli, and Albertinum. They have also presented solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Hannover and Galeria Arsenał, Białystok. Most recently, the Ukrainian artistic duo received the Curatorial Prize at OFFSCREEN Paris for their video installation You Shouldn’t Have to See This.
Their video works are held in the collections of Fondazione In Between Art Film, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Kontakt, TBA21, Frac Bretagne, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, among others. Their most recent installation was presented in Dare to Dream, a collateral event of the 60th Biennale di Venezia in 2024.
