CHICAGO, IL.- The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art is presenting Between Voice and Silence, an international group exhibition on view May 1 through June 28, 2025. The exhibition brings together three artists, Katya Lisova (Kyiv), Matvii Vaisberg (Kyiv), Ira Bondarenko (Ann Arbor), whose works in textiles, printmaking, ceramics, and fiber examine empathy, resilience, and the endurance of cultural identity against the backdrop of Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine.
The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Ukrainian poet Maksym Kryvtsov (1990 2024), who was killed defending his country in January 2023, only months after the publication of his debut collection. His writing, which locates tenderness and humanity amid destruction, serves as a moral and artistic touchstone for the works on view.
Between Voice and Silence takes its title Maksym’s poem “In that space between Voice and Silence” and alludes to the liminal space that defines wartime experience and the territory between what can be said and what is rendered unspeakable. The exhibition reflects on the limits and power of human agency in the face of overwhelming force. The value of humanity lies in its capacity to transcend adversity by embracing compassion and keeping empathy and human connection alive in the most oppressive darkness. Working across distinct media and generations, the three participating artists deploy Ukrainian visual vocabularies to contest cultural erasure and affirm collective memory.
Ira Bondarenko’s ceramic installation centers Boat for Maksym (2025), which comprises fourteen petal-shaped ceramic vessels inscribed with imagery and language drawn from Kryvtsov’s poetry. Arranged as a constellation in the form of a boat, the installation evokes vessels of the soul, fragile carriers of grief, hope, and testimony. Additional works in the exhibition include a pair of long fiber scrolls Between Voice and Silence (2025), alluding to Ukrainian ryshnyks that weave the poet’s words into the physical fabric of the exhibition.
Katya Lisova’s textile works showcase modern and traditional techniques: collage, sublimation fabric printing, and hand embroidery. Her work conveys a salvaging expression of humanity in the time of bestial cruelty of the Russian invasion. In the series Weak Signal (2024–2025), Lisova draws on her own experience of living through war to address the dissolution of identity, the fragility of historical memory, and the capacity for empathy to function as an act of resistance. A second series, Layering (2024–2025), investigates the border between what is remembered and what is lost, employing blurred outlines and translucent forms to render memory as perpetual transformation rather than fixed archive.
Matvii Vaisberg, one of Ukraine’s most distinguished graphic artists, contributes three bodies of print work produced in direct response to the full-scale Russian invasion: The Chronicles of War (2024), a grid of twenty-four prints documenting the visual landscape of conflict; Chess Game by the Cathedral (2023–2025), a sixteen-print series, and Thin Red Line (2023), a sequence of seven linocut prints culminating in a large painitng “Mariupol Nike”. Together, Vaisberg’s works form an unflinching graphic record that refuses to aestheticize destruction while insisting on the power of image and line to bear witness.
Uniting all three bodies of work is a recurring motif of red thread, which moves through ceramic, textile, and print alike, invoking the folk tradition of the protective thread while signaling an unbroken line of cultural resistance.
Matvii Vaisberg is a Kyiv-based graphic artist and book illustrator who studied at the Ukrainian Academy of Printing in Lviv (1986). He has participated in more than fifty solo and group exhibitions, including presentations at the National Museum of Art of Ukraine, the Berlin Wall Museum, the Ukrainian Institute of America (New York, 2014), and the European House (London, 2014). His works are held in the collections of the National Art Museum of Ukraine, the Museum of Modern Art in Odessa, and the Gaon Jewish State Museum in Vilnius, among others. A retrospective, The Human Factor, was presented at the National Art Museum of Ukraine in 2019. In 2026, the large-scale solo exhibition Matvii Vaisberg In Search of Lost Meaning, dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, was held at the Ukrainian House in Kyiv. In the same year, he was awarded the title of Honored Artist of Ukraine.
Katya Lisova is a Kyiv-based artist, designer, and art historian working in the fields of artistic textiles and digital graphics. She holds degrees from the Mykhailo Boichuk Institute of Decorative and Applied Arts and Design (2009) and the National Academy of Cultural and Artistic Leaders (2018), where she also taught from 2019 to 2024. She is the art historian of the Ukrainian Unofficial research project, focused on non conformist art movements in Ukraine during the late Soviet period (1950–1990). Her work has been exhibited internationally in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and the United States. Katya is a 2026 recipient of the Taras Shevchenko National Prize, awarded in the category of "Creative Curatorship of Cultural and Artistic Projects".
Ira Bondarenko is an emerging ceramic artist, native to Ukraine, currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Michigan’s Stamps School of Art & Design. Her work has been recognized in more than a dozen national and international competitions, including the Michigan Ceramic Art Association Competition and the 24th San Angelo National Ceramic Competition. She received grant awards from the University of Michigan Arts Initiative in 2023 and 2025.
