A botanical garden as exhibition space
On 25–27 September 2020, works and events occupied 22 garden locations. Greenhouses housed video art and the Climate Art Labs exhibition.
← Curator
Earthmate Eco Festival
Earthmate is an eco-festival founded and conceived by artist Lana Kaufman, who served as its commissioner. In September 2020, it brought contemporary art, music, environmental initiatives and public conversations to Kyiv’s M. M. Hryshko National Botanical Garden.
I worked on the art programme together with Maria Vtorushyna and Daria Koltsova. We placed works among plants, inside greenhouses and in the garden’s open spaces, addressing our relationships with other species and our responsibility for a shared environment.
Art among living things
Curatorial team
Maria Vtorushyna, Andrii Siguntsov and Daria Koltsova. Festival founder and commissioner: Lana Kaufman.
Artworks and projects
Anna Zvyagintseva — Transplant a Tree
An action rescuing chestnut saplings growing through concrete at an illegal construction site at 17–23 Honchara Street. Moved into a wooden box, the plants became witnesses to an urban conflict and the fragile coexistence of people and nature.
Maxim Dondyuk — Apeiron
Photographic negatives found in abandoned buildings in the Chornobyl exclusion zone. Emulsion damaged over time transforms fragments of personal photographs into abstract images of disappearance and memory.
Yuliia Radionova — Ecosexuals
A photographic project imagining Earth as a beloved being to care for, rather than a mother expected to provide endlessly.
Slava Kryzhanovskyi — Extinct
Four species destroyed by humans are reconstructed from fragments of human bodies. The digital images link animal extinction to human responsibility.
Yana Bachynska — Botanical Garden System
A short film built from interviews with botanical garden staff, whose voices reveal their daily labour and personal connections to the place.
Illia Chichkan and Ihor Tyshchenko — 51.2673 N, 30.2219 E
Filmed in Prypiat in 2019 during the Made in Chernobyl residency, the video addresses the aftermath of a technological disaster. At Earthmate it was shown among greenhouse plants.
Anton Reznikov — Sermon to the Worms
A graphic work about human proximity to other earthly beings. The image of worms brings ecological questions back to direct relationships between species.
Oleksii Zinchenko — Earth.
Five photographic works from a series about urban cemeteries and how people interact with them. Presented in the garden, they raised questions about death’s place in our perception of nature.
Climate Art Labs
A group exhibition inside the greenhouse, with works set among plants: an exhibition coexisting with the botanical garden’s living collection.
PLASTIKWOOD
A greenhouse installation combined plants with colourful plastic elements. The team also explored material reuse through a workshop on making animation from waste.
Artists and collectives
- Illia Chichkan
- Ihor Tyshchenko
- Anna Zvyagintseva
- Borys Kashapov
- Anton Saienko
- Yana Bachynska
- Climate Art Labs
- Plastikwood
- Oksana Fursa
- Slava Kryzhanovskyi
- Daria Koltsova
- Oleksii Zinchenko
- Lana Kaufman
- Yuliya Belyayeva
- Natasha Shulte
- Maxim Dondyuk
- Gorn
- Anton Reznikov
- Alina Maksymenko
- Yuliia Radionova
Exhibition sources: Vogue UkraineMaxim Dondyuk — Apeiron
About the project
Earthmate begins with the difficulty of recognising an ecological catastrophe that is already unfolding. Ukrainian artists and curators ask what environmental awareness can mean in practice, and whether relations with the non-human world can move beyond an exclusively human point of view. The exhibition presents doubts, fears and hopes rather than a set of reassuring slogans.
Its questions extend from interspecies ethics to the temptation to retreat into virtual worlds or private fantasies. Can another relationship with the ecosystem be practised, and what happens when its demands meet the limitations of local production?
These concerns shaped the making of the exhibition itself. Plastic was minimised, materials were reused where possible, glass and ordinary paper replaced some alternatives, and separate waste collection was organised. The process exposed the gap between the ideal of leaving no trace and the practical conditions of producing art. Irony became a way to speak about frightening phenomena while inviting audiences beyond an already environmentally engaged community.