MADRID.- The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and the TBA21 Art Contemporary present Pedagogies of War, the first solo exhibition in Spain by Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, leading figures of the new generation of Ukrainian visual artists. Curated by Chus Martínez the exhibition features four audiovisual installations created since the beginning of Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine. The pieces analyze how, in a context where war is omnipresent and increasingly mediated by screens, algorithmic systems, and remote technologies, systemic violence infiltrates everyday experience. This violence reconfigures perception, behavior, and collective life, operating even before it can be named or understood. The project is part of the long-term commitment of the museum and the TBA21 Foundation to artists in conflict situations and is supported by Ecolec Foundation.

The artists reject the idea of war as a singular historical event and break with the constant visual imagery presented by the media: conflict as spectacle. The exhibition conceives war as a training system that silently shapes bodies, reorganizes attention, and alters the very experience of everyday reality. In the words of Chus Martínez: "The exhibition can be read through the paradox formulated by Bertolt Brecht, who distinguished between Erlebnis—the immediate and immersive lived experience—and Erfahrung, the experience that is processed, reflected upon, and transformed into knowledge. For Brecht, art does not directly convey lived experience; it converts it into a form of understanding. What kind of knowledge, then, can art about war produce? One possible answer, explored throughout this exhibition, is that war radically transforms everything, while other aspects remain disturbingly familiar."

The artistic practice of Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk unfolds at the intersection of cinema, performance, and social observation. Their methodology goes beyond documentary recording, turning to the creation of fictional situations to reflect on how violence itself is staged and internalized in contexts of war. “From our perspective as civilians, our work offers a different perspective to that of the media, allowing us to slow down and reflect. We are interested in how war infiltrates everyday life, how it alters perception, and how memory is formed when, as in our case, proximity to conflict and the distance we must take as artists coexist,” they explain.

Four video essays

The four video installations, created from staged film footage and recordings of real people enduring the war in Ukraine, blur the lines between documentary and fiction. Taken as a whole, these works seek to combat clichés about a city at war and invite viewers to experience what everyday life is like in Kyiv—and in other Ukrainian territories—between bombings, eroding the safe distance we, as viewers, create when watching a televised war.

The exhibition is introduced by the video installation The Wanderer (2022), a work which was produced shortly after Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine and is part of the TBA21 Collection. In this piece, the artists use their bodies to stage the poses of fallen Russian soldiers' corpses, which blend into the natural landscape of the Carpathian Mountains. The video installation references Caspar David Friedrich's famous Romantic painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (c. 1817) and, by extension, the tradition of appropriating landscape that defines colonial aesthetics. Faced with the real horrors of war, the artists question the Romantic representation of death as sublime. The project also nods to the work of the Ukrainian art collective Fast Reaction Group—formed by Sergiy Bratkov, Boris and Vita Mikhailov, Sergi and Solonsky—known for their satirical and provocative work. Their photographic series, If I Were a German (1994), recreated the actions of German soldiers during the occupation of Kharkiv in World War II. Khimei and Malashchuk seek to reinterpret the scene from the German and, more broadly, European perspective of the current conflict.

The second piece, Open World (2025), recently presented at the 36th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, is a video installation that combines video game codes with documentary film techniques. Three years after the invasion, it follows a young Ukrainian displaced by the war as he remotely controls a military robot dog to explore the streets and places of his childhood. By reframing a device originally designed for surveillance and destruction as a means of connection and communication, the artists invite us to reflect on the idea of resilience, memory, and the possibility of maintaining a sense of belonging despite distance.

The third work in the exhibition, You Shouldn't Have to See This (2024)—recognized with the OFFSCREEN Paris Curatorial Award, which honors not only the work itself but also the curatorial effort and conceptual power—is a six-channel video installation marked by silence that shows Ukrainian children sleeping. Far from the apparent stillness of these images, these children are among the more than 20,000 documented cases of people forcibly transferred to Russian territory (and later returned to their country of origin) since the beginning of the war between Russia and Ukraine in 2014. By intentionally crossing the boundaries of privacy and walking the fine line between an affectionate gaze and voyeurism, Khimei and Malashchuk question how the media shapes our perception: what is shown and what is hidden. The installation thus places the viewer in the complex terrain of witnessing, a space where empathy, responsibility, and reflection converge.

Finally, the duo presents We Didn’t Start This War (2026) for the first time, a new commission by TBA21 for the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. This installation—whose title refers to a phrase repeated by Ukrainian civil society in response to the Russian invasion—presents an audiovisual triptych conceived in a context of war, yet the images do not depict violence. Instead, the screens show the result of sustained attention to a routine that has almost disappeared for Ukrainian society: everyday life that passes without visible catastrophes. In the words of the artists, “through the recreation of mundane reality in Kyiv, we start a conversation with a viewer about the representation of a country at war.”

Together, the four video essays assert the capacity of art to sustain collective reflection at a time when violence risks becoming routine. The exhibition focuses on direct experience and dialogue between cinema and contemporary social realities. It is a place from which to assert art as a shared political space, where people appear as equals and peace can continue to be conceived as a daily collective practice.