Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk’s “Pedagogies of War”

The first room of Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk’s exhibition is littered with dead bodies. Or so it appears: looking around at the five screens showing corpses sprawled in a forest, you might swear that you saw one of them twitch. And then you glimpse another surreptitiously stretching out an arm that has grown numb, like an actor onstage who, having been the first to die in a long battle scene, has become intolerably uncomfortable. Two bodies face down in the snow raise their heads, nod to each other as if to confirm that this is enough, and stand up. The film loops, and they are dead on the floor again.

The Wanderer (2022) “depicts scenes in the Carpathian Mountains,” according to curator Chus Martinez’s essay, with the Ukrainian filmmakers recreating the postures of fallen Russian soldiers. The phrasing contains an ambiguity that, whether or not it is deliberate, is nonetheless illuminating: barely any fighting has taken place in the Carpathian Mountains, which run through the west of Ukraine, since the Russian invasion. Which implies that these are not literal reproductions of documentary photographs, or even realistic reenactments of the conflict that has disfigured the much less photogenic landscape of eastern Ukraine, but self-consciously “cinematic” reflections on the representation of violent death in visual culture, staged in a landscape more closely associated with World War Two. 

What the optimistic viewer might initially mistake for an act of imaginative empathy—two young Ukrainian men putting themselves in the place of their Russian counterparts, in protest against a war that pits them against each other—becomes more troubling and elusive. The attritional war in Ukraine, with its endless minefields and vast trench systems, looks nothing like these picturesque battle scenes. And so the title, with its allusion to Caspar David Friedrich’s archetype of the Romantic hero, might be read as a taunt: Did these Russian soldiers believe that they would die the glorious death of lone fighters in snowy mountains, like the Red Army fighting back fascism? Or perhaps it is the western European audience that stands accused: Is this what we think war looks like?

However you read it, this work seems to be less about some future reconciliation than the dismantlement of idealized representations of war and the peace that might follow it. By operating a tight temporal loop (the videos last only a few minutes) while gesturing towards the lives that continue offscreen (the artists walk away), The Wanderer combines the repetitious experience of trauma with the unavoidable fact that the world will carry on regardless of your sacrifice or suffering. That these two things can be true at the same time is the circle that this exhibition attempts to square. 

This attempt finds its richest expression in Open World (2025), which charts the return to his hometown of a Ukrainian teenager who fled the war as a boy. This is made possible by one of the “robot dogs” used by modern armies for reconnaissance, which serves as a roaming proxy through which to make contact with his family and residents. These encounters are heartwarming, but a seed of doubt has been sown. That the dog is filmed in the third person suggests the accompaniment of a drone, which calls into question the documentary veracity of these scenes. Is it credible that the residents of Zaporizhzhia would respond so positively to the appearance in their midst of these twin instruments of military surveillance?

The two-channel video is indebted to Pierre Huyghe’s Untitled (Human Mask) (2014), which likewise follows an uncannily human avatar through a devastated landscape. It shares that work’s interest in the human compulsion to maintain our routines through catastrophe, which might be read either as madness (“how can you go on like this?”) or as admirable tenacity (“life must go on”). This ambivalence is dramatized by a scene in which the boy—now a young man approaching “fighting age”—leaves his mother hanging on the end of the line while he goes to pay for a takeaway being delivered to the flat in Poland from which he is speaking. When he comes back from having paid the courier, he claims unconvincingly to miss home.   

These two works are engaging because they suggest a simple moral lesson (the “pedagogy” of the exhibition’s title) before seeming to pull the rug out from under the viewer’s feet. This requires a subtlety missing from You Shouldn’t Have to See This (2024), a six-channel video installation which relies for its affective charge on the contrast between images of peacefully sleeping children and the information that they were among the many thousands who have been abducted by Russian forces from the occupied territories of Ukraine since the first incursions in 2014. It’s a shock tactic of the kind beloved by propagandists irrespective of their cause, and this second invasion of traumatized children’s privacy to score a point against an audience forced into voyeurism does not seem to me justified. (Is this a point, after all, that anyone visiting this exhibition in Madrid is likely to dispute?)

That nothing is the same after the experience of trauma, and that the world continues nonetheless to turn, is an idea made more productively by We Didn’t Start this War (2026), presented on three standing screens amidst the same plush pink furnishings (the whole show is beautifully installed). Each presents an unremarkable street scene that is interrupted by an incident of the kind that takes place thousands of times a day in every city—a pedestrian slips on an icy curb; a bike courier runs into a stationary car; a man swallows a bee—before returning to what we must call “normal.”

The atmosphere is heightened by the awareness that these minor calamities were staged in Kyiv, a city in which drone strikes and air raid sirens rank as everyday dramas. The speed at which the incident is forgotten might be taken as an endorsement of human resilience, an indictment of our willingness to repress the memory of anything that might unsettle our routines, or an illustration of the way that every small event in the context of war is freighted with existential threat. It might be all of these things at the same time, or it might depend on the viewer’s position in relation to what they are being shown.

However it is read, the work does not offer either emotional catharsis or intellectual resolution. It summons an atmosphere of commingled dread and defiance, in which an understanding of the shattering impact of violence on a society must co-exist with the conviction that a better future remains possible. The works in the show do not always succeed in reconciling these principles, or the feelings of hope, anger, resentment, and sadness they are likely to provoke in the viewer. They are better for it.