FRIEDRICHSHAFEN.- With the exhibition TRIGGER WARNING, the Kunstverein Friedrichshafen opens the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany by Ukrainian artist Alina Kleytman. Through new sculptural installations and video works, Kleytman explores violence, war, trauma, and the imagery of collective memory. The exhibition creates a space in which political reality and emotional experience collide directly.

At the centre of the exhibition are newly produced works that engage with the psychological, political, and social consequences of war. Sculptural hybrid bodies oscillating between human and animal appear as fragile and vulnerable, yet at the same time lascivious and prone to violence: assembled from body bags and materials that evoke emergency care, protection, and destruction. Kleytman’s Close Your Eyes And Open Your Mouth moves between monument and ruin, between grotesque and vulnerability. The works embody states of fear, helplessness, and resistance, making visible how violence inscribes itself into bodies, images, and collective imaginaries.

Newly produced video works, Are U Tired?, Thank You, Daddy! and Cradle of Democracy expand this bodily space into a political and medial landscape. In them, Kleytman works with exaggeration, fetish, performance and post-ironic intensification. Are U Tired? transforms the question of the morally correct stance toward contemporary military conflicts into a sexualised interrogation. What happens when empathy becomes a pose, when the commitment to democratic values appears just as consumable as any other image? Tiredness is human. But it can also become an excuse to withdraw, while others have no possibility of leaving the war.





Born in Kharkiv in 1991, Alina Kleytman works across sculpture, performance, and video. Her practice combines political analysis with mythological narratives and emotional intensity. She describes her artistic method as “hysterical realism.” Kleytman’s works have been exhibited internationally and are included in collections such as the ERSTE Foundation in Vienna and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. She has received numerous awards, including the Women in Visual Arts Prize of the Ukrainian Institute. Following her participation in LISTE Art Basel in June 2026, TRIGGER WARNING at Kunstverein Friedrichshafen offers the first comprehensive insight into her current body of work.