Ai Weiwei Debuts Major New Work at Pavilion of Culture, Ukraine
moderator: mark wasiuta
speakers: anton kolomeitsev, david serlin, nazar bagnyuk
partner: the national rehabilitation center UNBROKEN, lviv city council.
year: 2025
The panel discussion, complemented by archival research, focuses on prosthetic infrastructure using the city of Lviv as a case study — it being a hub for reconstructive surgery and the adaptation of war-wounded bodies. Moderated by Mark Wasiuta, the conversation moves through ideas of artificiality, techne, mimicry, and design, considering both body and city across micro- and macro-scales. It approaches the urban and corporeal as a shared field of observation, documentation, and inquiry. The discussion will feature Anton Kolomeitsev, Chief Architect of the City of Lviv (Ukraine); David Serlin, Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego (USA); and Nazar Bagnyuk, Head of the Prosthetics Department at the National Rehabilitation Centre UNBROKEN Rehabilitation Centre (Ukraine). The event and research are the result of work by the curatorial team — Iryna Miroshnykova, Oleksii Petrov (ФОРМА), Maria Noschenko (Pavilion of Culture), and Sonya Kvasha (Baby Prod) — in collaboration with the National Rehabilitation Centre UNBROKEN and with Lviv City Council.
The archival research on Lviv — a 13th-century city in western Ukraine — turns toward the city’s corpus and the notion of care as an urban condition. Lviv’s medical infrastructure has evolved through 19th-century prosthetic factories, Theophil Hansen’s architectural project for a veterans’ nursing home, the city’s medicinal plant gardens, and Janusz Witwicki’s panoramic model of Lviv created between 1929 and 1944. Across these sites, the research reveals how the city sculpts, communicates, and embodies healing. As the full-scale war continues to disrupt urban and human form, Lviv responds by recalibrating itself as a city for healing.
Referring to the example of UNBROKEN, Ukraine’s first prosthetics and orthotics center to meet ISPO standards, the publication expands on the reciprocal relationship between body and built infrastructure. Initially conceived as a mobile prosthetic workshop, the facility has since grown into a 1,000 m² center that annually can produce around 1,200 upper and lower limb prostheses to address the growing need for local production. Constructed within four months using cross-laminated timber panels — an innovative technology for Ukraine enabling rapid assembly under wartime conditions. The architectural project of the rehabilitation center was developed with the participation of Nazar Bagnyuk, the center’s chief prosthetics specialist.
The accompanying publication “Unbroken: Fragility, Body, Architecture” presents a conversation between Nazar Bagnyuk and Mark Wasiuta, paired with a new visual essay by Elena Subach. In the interview, the Chief Prosthetics Specialist describes prosthetic-making both as a technical process and a profoundly human, social, and aesthetic endeavor.
Elena Subach’s new photographic series, rediscovers the materiality of the prosthetic to underscore how recovery depends on human attentiveness toward the other. Known for her work on vulnerability, trauma, and reconstruction, Subach documents three intensive days at the Laboratory of Walking, where engineers, rehabilitation specialists, psychologists, and patients work together to produce new steps. Avoiding spectacle in favor of substance, the lens contemplates empathy stripped of sensationalism — much like a rehabilitation specialist approaches their work.
The event aims to create a space for conversation on the interaction between humans and architecture in times of crisis and transformation. Through the perspectives of architects, war veterans, researchers and artists, it outlines how perceptions of the body, fragility, and resilience within the urban environment are changing, and how architecture can respond to these transformations. Can inclusion remain universal when the universal body vanishes? What might a city look like in a state of total adaptation? In light of Carlo Ratti’s curatorial statement, we are left wondering: is it possible to design something more intelligent than our own feet?
Ai Weiwei Debuts Major New Work at Pavilion of Culture, Ukraine
In this era, being invited to hold an exhibition in Kyiv, the capital of a country at war, I hope to express certain ideas and reflections through my work. My artworks are not merely an aesthetic expression but also a reflection of my position as an individual navigating immense political shifts, international hegemonies, and conflicts. This exhibition provides a platform to articulate these concerns. At its core, this exhibition is a dialogue about war and peace, rationality and irrationality.
–Ai Weiwei
–Ai Weiwei
Commissioned by RIBBON International, Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White represents a continuation and evolution of Ai’s engagement with war. A site-specific response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine amid escalating armed conflicts threatening the world of today, Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White is testament to the possibilities of art in an age of war. In mining the ideologically-charged objects of the past as the raw materials of his art, Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White recalls internationally-renowned artworks such as Ai’s Straight (2008-2012), Human Flow (2017) and various life vest installations.
Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s De Divina Proportione, the work comprises three mathematically-precise spheres. These forms celebrate Renaissance ideals of rationality and order, paying homage to Da Vinci’s mathematical world while signaling the chaos of its states of exception.
An extension of Ai’s seminal Five Raincoats Holding a Star, first shown in the late 1980s, each sphere is enveloped in a custom-designed camouflage fabric, which also forms a connective structure across the entire installation. By foregoing conventional military textiles and instead using an atypical camouflage made up of the small and intimate forms of animals, the sculpture instead becomes a testament to both human and non-human victims of war. This has been informed by Ai’s own work in animal rescue, with domestic animals and wildlife amongst the many overlooked casualties of wartime.
Working with Ukrainian producers, metalworkers and seamstresses, the work and the process of its realization has seen Ai embark on numerous research trips to the country, with Ukrainians sharing their lived experience with Ai. This has included the artist engaging with frontline soldiers, veterans, medical professionals, producers, and members of the public, as well as female veteran organisations, each imparting on the work an indelible mark. These trips will also inform a forthcoming series of work by Ai focused specifically on Ukraine, and shaped by what he has seen, heard and experienced during his travels throughout the country. Taking the form of a public artwork, and further film, more information will be announced later in the year.
Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White is housed in Pavilion 13 in Kyiv, renovated this year by ФОРМА and RIBBIN International, and home to Pavilion of Culture. Presented within the glass walls of the former exposition hall– constructed in 1967 to showcase the coalmining achievements of the Ukrainian SSR – the work stages a dialogue between the building’s architectural transparency and its layered histories. It questions what is revealed and what remains hidden from view in narratives of progress and power.
The exhibition will also see an engaged and active public program titled “Addressing the Concealed” that launches from September 13 and will run across weekends throughout the exhibition. Curated by Pavilion of Culture, the public program will include a series of talks, workshops, panel discussions and events held in Pavilion 13.
Beginning with an in-conversation between Ai and journalist, human rights activist and war veteran Maksym Butkevych, there will also be a panel discussion on September 14 moderated by journalist Myroslava Gongadze, organised in collaboration with Ukrainska Pravda. The public program engages with the themes present in Ai’s work, touching on propaganda, freedom of speech, the politics of memory as well as land art as remembrance.