Lee Cavaliere, the newly appointed artistic director of the Volta art fairs, has joined forces with Ukrainian American artist Ola Rondiak, who creates folk art-inspired works, to organise a Ukrainian Pavilion at Volta New York (until 8 September). Introduced by the New York gallerist Ethan Cohen last year, Cavaliere and Rondiak met in March in Kyiv, amid Russia’s ongoing military assault, to provide the fair director with a crash course in Ukraine’s contemporary art scene.
One dealer he met in Ukraine is a trained dancer who lost the ability to dance after Russia’s full-scale invasion. “Everyone’s lost something here. It’s unexpected what you will lose, but she said, ‘At least I’ve just lost that. It’s not much, and it might come back, but in the meantime I’m just going to curate shows, find artists, have these conversations and make something happen.’ It is just incredible.” The fair’s goal, he says, is to “highlight that life goes on” in Ukraine.
Rondiak connected Volta’s organisers with the charity Razom for Ukraine to fund dealers’ trips to New York. The Kyiv gallery The Naked Room, which organised the Ukrainian presentation at the 2022 Venice Biennale, will be at Volta. Another Kyiv space, Dymchuk Gallery, will show dream-like images with environmental themes by the artist duo Synchrodogs (Roman Noven and Tania Shcheglova). Meanwhile, the Lviv-based Ya Gallery is showing works by the Primitivist painter Dmitry Moldovanov, including a depiction of Vladimir Putin’s severed head in Hearing the Wolves (2022).
Icons on ammo boxes
Since Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, the husband-and-wife duo Sofia Atlantova and Olexander Klimenko have been painting icons on remnants of Russian ammunition boxes. Sales help fund the Kyiv-based aid group Wings of Victory, which supports injured and disabled servicemen. Their work is being brought to Volta by the New York-based gallery Black & White Project Space, which will also show works by the late Ukrainian American artist Shimon Okshteyn. New York’s Mriya Ukrainian art gallery is showing a sculpture of a pregnant woman by Maria Kulikovska, who fled Crimea in 2014 and Kyiv in 2022.
Shimon Okshteyn, Color of My City, 1979 Courtesy the artist and Black & White Project Space
At Volta, Rondiak—who, with her daughter Maya, an artist and musician, has joined the fair’s advisory board—is presenting one of her metal Motanka sculptures, inspired by “ancient Ukrainian rag dolls that are passed down from mothers to daughters as a talisman for good health and fortune”, she says. She created a Motanka army in Kyiv on a giant chessboard for the Art Ukraine Gallery, which fundraises for a children’s hospital that was hit by a Russian missile in July, as a symbol of “protection and healing” from the invasion. The New York Motanka will be visible from the street outside the fair venue in Chelsea.
“The fact that we were all able to pull our forces together and make this Ukrainian Pavilion happen, it was really a force of determination and resilience,” Rondiak says. “Ukrainians are not victims,” she adds. “We are strong. We want to be seen and heard.”
- Volta New York, until 8 September, Chelsea Industrial, Manhattan