HANNOVER.- Kyiv-based filmmakers Roman Khimei (born in 1992) and Yarema Malashchuk (born in 1993) have been working together since 2016. Their artistic work often focuses on marginalised figures, characters who might be seen as extras against the backdrop of imperialist mythologies.

The exhibition presents, in part as installations, a selection of film works created between 2022 and 2025 all of which deal with the events that took place since the attack on the young Ukrainian democracy. They address both the multiple Russian crimes as well as the resilience of the Ukrainian people. The filmic contributions use semi-fictional scenarios to tell of the realities that have been the sad truth in Ukraine for over 1,000 days now.

Room 1

The Wanderer, 2022
Five-channel video installation, LED screens, dimensions variable, no sound

In The Wanderer (2022), Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk work with staged cinematic images that situate their own bodies amidst the rocky landscape of the Carpathian Mountains. The artists use their bodies to recreate poses of the corpses of fallen soldiers, repeatedly comparing their bizarre poses to the materials on a laptop. Dressed in trekking clothes, they resemble hikers who spontaneously decided to take over roles of extras in a film. With the command raz, dva, tri (one, two, three), they give the signal to take a photo.

The project refers to the work by the Ukrainian artist group Fast Reaction Group (Sergiy Bratkov, Boris and Vita Mikhailov, as well as Sergiy Solonsky), whose photographic series If I Were a German (1994) re-enacted the actions of German soldiers during the occupation of Kharkiv in World War II. With this work, Khimei and Malashchuk question the German and Western view of the Russian war in Ukraine and, at the same time, allude to the contemporary practices of war photography.

The Wanderer was created shortly after the onset of the Russian invasion and failed annexation of Ukraine. The film’s title and the steady flow of its sequences of images refer to the celebrated Romantic painting The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich and the colonial approach to the landscape. Faced with the genuine horrors of war, the artists criticize the romanticized imagery of death as something sublime. In this context, the fallen Russian soldiers are cast as contemporary colonizers of Ukraine in an act of symbolic revenge which breaks the taboo associated with making the bodies of the dead visible.

Room 2

Additional Scenes, 2024 Single-channel video, sound 16:41 min

The film Additional Scenes (2024) adopts the point of view of the former actor Pavlo Aldoshyn, who returns to Kyiv from the front for the first time since 2022 to act in scenes of civilian life. To Aldoshyn this new reality appears as fiction and calls for his acting skills in order to be experienced and lived in an authentic manner.

In this process of readjustment his changed perception of the world manifests itself as alienation. Blurring the boundaries between documentary and feature film, Additional Scenes addresses the burden of military service and the identity conflicts it frequently entails.

Aldoshyn played the leading role in the film Sniper: The White Raven, which depicts the events of the Russian-Ukrainian war of 2014. At the beginning of the 2022 invasion, the actor, like many other people who previously worked in the civilian sector, joined the armed forces of Ukraine. The scenes filmed by Khimei and Malashchuk suggest that the distinction between military personnel and civilians - which still prevails worldwide - should be re-evaluated to account for the disquieting existences that unfold on the margins of the ongoing wars.

Room 3

You Shouldn’t Have to See This, 2024 Six-channel video installation, LED screens, dimensions variable, no sound

The silence of the video installation You Shouldn’t Have to See This emphasizes the blissful yet fragile moment of empathy brought about by the sight of sleeping children. At the same time, this act of observing triggers a feeling of unease. Khimei and Malashchuk filmed Ukrainian children who had been forcibly taken into Russian territory and later returned to Ukraine. The estimated numbers of those abductions range from 20,000 to over a million cases since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014. While drawing attention to this heinous war crime, the artists offer a compelling account of childhood during the ongoing war.

By deliberately violating the boundaries of pri- vacy, crossing the line between the loving gaze and voyeurism, Khimei and Malashchuk question the production of war images and examine their inherent conflict of representation: each such image is first and foremost evidence of a crime and only then and only potentially a work of art (one that should never have been created).

The act of observing can lead to a false sense of involvement or to a feeling of relief that arises from the aesthetic qualities of the images.

Nonetheless, authentic images and their existence in the public sphere serve as testimonies with genuine political impact.

Room 4

Explosions Near the Museum, 2023
Video projection, sound 13:38 min
Take-home artists’ poster, A2

The camera’s inquisitive and voracious gaze registers the empty plinths and display cases of an evacuated museum. Those are traces of the violent loss of the material heritage of Ukrainian cultural history. The forensic work Explosions Near the Museum (2023) documents the local history museum in Kherson which was systematically looted by Russian troops at the end of 2022. The video was made shortly after these troops were pushed back by the Ukrainian army. The museum was home to one of the largest and oldest collections of antiquities in southern Ukraine, with over 173,000 objects, some as much as 7,000 years old. Malashchuk and Khimei captured the haunting remains of the intended erasure of cultural heritage in video and audio recordings shortly afterwards.

The (missing) exhibits are given a new space through voice-over and descriptions. They are shown in absentia: things that have disappeared tell different stories than things that would be on display. But each absence also carries the potentiality of reclaiming memories and narratives constituting the objects’ cultural fabric. This paves the way for a vision of hope and resistance with which to imagine collective care for the past and a future beyond destruction. The short film Explosion Near the Museum won the national competition at the 15th edition of the Lviv International Short Film Festival – LISFF Wiz-Art.

Room 5

Four Seasons (Winter), 2025 Single-channel video, sound 9:28 min

In this new work a buzzing noise is repeatedly interrupted by the sound of a small object hitting against a window inside of a room.

It is not, as one could expect, made by an animal with wings, a bird or an insect trying to get in, but a mini drone. Its aerial maneuvers of attempts to fly or escape reference the activities of many young people in Ukraine who practice piloting these small FPV (First Person View) flying objects at home to acquire skills in the event of military conscription.

The seemingly simple yet highly impressive work serves as a parable of the inner conflict of an entire generation of young people faced with the questions: Stay away from the front?, Escape?, Desert?, Flight or Fight?.