Featured Project
Merging with the Garden Art Show by Rukh Art Hub. Mriya Gallery, Tribeca, NYC. Photo by Lesia Dutchak
The word Rukh stands for Movement in Ukrainian. Rukh Art Hub, the creative initiative promoting Ukrainian contemporary art in New York City, focuses on giving Ukrainian art momentum and a voice to Ukrainian creatives and curators. Polina Kuznetsova, Mariia Manuilenko, and Olga Severina are leading Rukh Art Hub, a project dedicated to cultivating and promoting Ukrainian art and culture in New York City and beyond.
Polina Kuznetsova, an artist from Kharkiv, is known for her work in magical realism. Her art features sharp forms and lines, utilizing silhouettes and flattened imagery to create a mythical dimension that transcends temporal and spatial boundaries. Following the invasion by Russia in February 2022, Kuznetsova evacuated to Tallinn, Estonia, but returned to Ukraine six months later. She curated Rukh Art Hub’s exhibition, Merging with the Garden. Kuznetsova views the exhibition as poetry: “The artworks featured in this exhibition are like flowers and trees born in greenhouses to be later transplanted into this garden—the garden where viewers can ponder those existential questions that touch them the most.”
Mariia Manuilenko, co-founder and managing director of Rukh Art Hub, has a background as an art historian and curator. Her initiatives, such as the multi-media platform Art-Territory Ukraine and the XI triennial immersive exhibition The 4th Block in Kharkiv, reflect her commitment to Ukrainian art. The outbreak of war prompted her relocation to Poland, but she continued to travel between Ukraine, Poland, and the USA to promote Ukrainian culture. “Ukraine is so much more than just a maimed state soiled with blood. Our homeland is a place of beauty — a country bursting with creativity, passion, tenderness, tolerance, and a thirst for life, and we want the world to see it as such!” she asserts.
Olga Severina, Co-founder and creative director of Rukh Art Hub, began collaborating with Manuilenko in 2022, aiming to support Ukraine through charity events and exhibitions. Severina works as a designer, lecturer, and curator of the PosterTerritory initiative. Since moving to the United States in 2010, Severina has organized and curated events addressing social, environmental, and political issues, with notable projects like Stand With Ukraine and The World After.
The season-end exhibition, Merging with the Garden, presented at Mriya Gallery in Tribeca, New York, showcases the resilience and creativity of Ukrainian artists amidst ongoing conflict. “With our venue partner, Mriya Gallery, this vision is becoming a reality. None of it would be possible without our team and amazing volunteers,” Manuilenko reflects. Through their combined efforts, Kuznetsova, Manuilenko, and Severina aim to ensure that the world recognizes the beauty and creativity of Ukrainian art. Rukh Art Hub is a testament to their dedication.
Can you give us some background on the recent Merging with the Garden show?
“As an artist, I often explore the theme of rebirth associated with the cycles of nature. It is especially relevant when spring is almost upon us, on Easter’s Eve, when looking at the bare, blackened soil, we ask ourselves: ‘Will new life ever spout on this land? Will it again be covered with a bed of flowers?’— says the curator of the project, Polina Kuznetsova. These universal ideas of death and resurrection that echo our notions of hope and its triumph over despair are what became the driving force behind this project.
When death is so close to us, we see life differently. In some ways, this project is the reaction to living through war and an analysis of how it affected artists across the war-ravaged Ukraine. Surprisingly, when looking at contemporary Ukrainian art, one will notice that a theme of young saplings bursting through the ruins is becoming increasingly common. This is our story and a story of this exhibition—a story of overcoming incredible odds while still believing that life and life will always prevail. It is a celebration of hope.
Please highlight some of the work on that show.
The show’s Sunflower series by Alisa Konakhova challenges conventional notions of sin and pleasure and offers a fresh perspective on these archetypal notions as gateways to ecstasy and spiritual fulfillment.
Spring is an enlivening canvas painted in war-ravaged Kyiv. The image of a teenage girl draped in an airy rose gown walking towards her future is a vision of a spring reborn—a spirit of hope eternal. The Spring casts off, as if a raven-colored shroud, a somber shadow of left-behind sorrows. The cuts on the girl’s wrists are harrowing keepsakes of hellish days of her despondent past. She walks across the sable lands, but through the soil, verdant seedlings burgeon.
How do you see this show in the context of your previous endeavors?
Merging with the Garden exhibition is a continuation of our main mission, which is to promote both upcoming and established artists and curators from Ukraine. It, however, stands out among other RUKH Art Hub projects because, for the first time, we’ve put together a show that featured artworks that were previously on display in Ukrainian museums, such as the series Love by Mykola Kolomiets. Another first for us was a chance to showcase the art of photography on such a large scale, where Merging with the Garden introduced the audience to the works from the School of Conceptual Photography Myth from the city of Mykolaiv.
Every project is an experiment, and Merging with the Garden was no exception—this was the first show to feature work by an American artist. It is important for us to continue with this multi-cultural integration, which will help immerse Ukrainian creatives into the art worlds of New York and the USA. Pushing the envelope even further, Merging with the Garden became our largest exhibition to date, where artworks were on display in the showrooms on both first and second stories. This was a fairly complex installation, but we managed to showcase a great number of different pieces that were tied together by the overall concept of the exhibition.
Looking ahead, what can we expect from your future projects? Could you give us a glimpse into your creative vision and the direction you’re heading?
We started our work in the USA in 2022 with fundraising events under the umbrella of our “Art Territory Ukraine” initiative. By 2023, we realized that there was so much more we wanted to do and share with the world. This led to the creation of the Rukh Art Hub and brought us to New York City—an amazing place full of energy, beauty, and thrust for life.
For our future projects, we plan to continue bringing together Ukrainian and American artists and curators and grow and expand the platform where they can exchange ideas and collaborate. Our goal is to participate in different American art shows, working side by side with our venue partner, the Mriya Gallery. We will present our new project at Volta 2024 in NYC and are planning to introduce several new projects this fall. We are open to cooperation and new ideas as we believe artists to be visionaries who can change our future for the better or even create a brand-new future—the one we cannot even imagine.