Julia Beliaeva: Bestiary

LU Gallery presents Bestiary, a solo exhibition by Ukrainian artist Julia Beliaeva, curated by Kristina Borhes. Drawing on mythology, folklore, and the history of art, Beliaeva constructs a world of hybrid creatures whose unsettling bodies challenge conventional ideas of femininity, desire, and power. Taking the medieval bestiary as its conceptual framework, the exhibition draws parallels between past and present, revealing a world that hardly changed. Historically, bestiaries assembled real and imaginary creatures into systems of moral and symbolic interpretation. In Beliaeva’s practice, however, the “monstrous” resists such classification. Her creatures inhabit a space in which femininity, animality, sexuality, and power become unstable categories, exposing the contradictions embedded in our understanding of what is acceptable.

Working across sculpture in porcelain and bronze, 3D printing, digital technologies, and etching, Beliaeva revisits familiar images from European art and literature, transforming them into figures of contemporary experience. She treats inherited imagery as an active material, capable of acquiring new meanings under the pressures of the present. In dialogue with Goya’s exploration of reason, fantasy, and their monsters, Bestiary asks whether the monstrous necessarily belongs to the realm of irrationality, or whether it might instead reveal the contradictions of a world that considers itself rational.

Created against the backdrop of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, many of the works in Bestiary engage directly with the persistence of imperial violence and its visual languages. Yet the exhibition extends beyond a strictly political reading. Its creatures also embody forms of resistance that are intimate and psychological. Bestiary presents an open-ended collection of figures in which the factual and fictional, historical and contemporary, personal and political merge into a constantly shifting monstrous body, suggesting that monstrosity may be less an aberration from the human condition than one of its most revealing expressions.

Julia Beliaeva (b. 1988, Haisyn, Ukraine) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Kyiv. Working across sculpture, digital media, and installation, she combines traditional materials, particularly porcelain, with technologies such as 3D scanning, modelling, and printing. Her practice explores the relationship between cultural heritage and contemporary experience, addressing questions of identity, collective memory, trauma, and power dynamics.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an artist talk and the Ukrainian presentation of the book Fragile City (DISTANZ Verlag), followed by a Q&A with Julia Beliaeva and Kristina Borhes at LU Gallery on Sunday, November 15, 2026, at 6pm.

With the support of Adam Harber Foundation