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?