What does it mean to speak, write, and create while a war is still unfolding? In this panel, art theorists and artists examine the ethical stakes of cultural discourse in times of ongoing conflict, questioning the limits of interpretation, representation, and critical distance. The discussion asks how artistic, theoretical, and public forms of discourse can engage with violence, responsibility, and lived realities without simplifying them or reducing them to stereotypical or externally imposed narratives.

Nikolay Karabynovych (1988, Odesa, Ukraine) is an artist who works with media such as video, performance, sound, and sculpture. He explores the social history of Eastern Europe, approaching collective and personal memory with analytical, conceptual, and interventionist tactics. His works have been shown in numerous institutions, such as M HKA, Antwerp; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Jewish Museum of Belgium, Brussels; Bozar, Brussels; Pinchuk Art Center, Kyiv. He has also participated at the steirischer herbst (2024), the Kaunas Biennale (2023) and the Kyiv Biennale (2021, 2023), among others. He lives in Amsterdam.

Katia Denysova is an art historian and curator specialising in Ukraine’s modernist art. She defended her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 2024. Katia is a co-curator of the travelling exhibition »In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s« (winner of the 2023 Apollo Exhibition of the Year Award) and a contributing co-editor of the accompanying catalogue published by Thames & Hudson in 2022. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tübingen in Germany, where she co-leads a research project on abstraction in East-Central Europe supported by the Getty’s Connecting Art Histories grant. Katia held the Ukrainian Research in Switzerland (URIS) fellowship at the University of Basel in 2025 and is currently a Lesia Ukraїnka Junior Visiting Fellow with the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.

Georg Schöllhammer, editor-in-chief of springerin – Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, director of tranzit.at since 2004 and one of the initiators of Office Ukraine. He has worked internationally on projects such as documenta, Manifesta, the Venice Biennials, São Paulo, Gyumri and The School of Kyiv 2015, Kyiv Biennial 2023 and 2025, lives in Vienna.

Asia Bazdyrieva is a scholar and writer whose work probes the relationship between language and territory. With a background in art history and analytical chemistry, she interrogates the ways environments are produced through mediations that intertwine aesthetic regimes, power, and technopolitics. She examines the material consequences of these processes on bodies and lands, while articulating the ways the latter resist. Bazdyrieva is a researcher at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and serves on the advisory board of the transmediale festival in Berlin.

Moderation: Anastasiia Diachenko, Office Ukraine Wien

Panel discussion in English language.

Venue: Depot, Breite Gasse 3, 1070 Vienna

The event is a cooperation between Office Ukraine and Depot. Kunst und Diskussion.

Header image: Nikolay Karabynovych