The River Wailed Like a Wounded Beast

Artists: Mykola Bazarkin, Oleksii Podat, Yarema Malashchuk, Roman Khimei.

On June 6, 2023, Russian troops blew up the dam of the Kakhovka hydroelectric station reservoir, flooding dozens of villages and three nature reserves on the Ukrainian steppe. On March 22, 2024, during yet another missile attack on Ukraine, Russian missiles hit the Dnipro hydroelectric station, causing pollution of the Dnipro River and damaging the power plant’s dam (for the first time since the Second World War). These two episodes—just a small part of the tragic series of events Ukraine and Europe are facing—force us to reexamine the origins of the present-day energy infrastructure, its connection with environmental crimes and totalitarian regimes of the past. The construction of a cascade of hydroelectric stations on the Dnipro River and its cinematic representation offer us a look at the dark side of Soviet modernization with its “subjugation of nature” narrative, continued today in Russia’s colonial ideology.

The project has been created in cooperation between the Visual Culture Research Center / Kyiv Biennial and the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre.

The Visual Culture Research Center is an independent cultural institution in Kyiv, founded in 2008 as a platform for collaboration between the academic, artistic and activist communities. The center is an independent public organization involved in publishing and exhibition activities, scientific research, holding public lectures, discussions and conferences.

The Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Center (Dovzhenko Center) is the largest film archive of Ukraine, which stores more than 7,000 titles of feature, documentary, animated Ukrainian and foreign films and thousands of archival documents on the history of Ukrainian cinema. The Dovzhenko Center is nowadays one of the most dynamic cultural institutions of Ukraine.

Curators: Alona Penzii, Stanislav Bytiutskyi, Oleksandr Teliuk / architecture of the exhibition space: Oleksandr Burlaka / exhibition design: Lera Guievska / co-ordination of Kyiv Biennial: Vasyl Cherepanyn, Serge Klymko / co-ordination, TRAFO:  Andrzej Witczak, Dominika Głowala, Anna Sienkiewicz-Rogaś.