Image: Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv
Karina Synytsia’s solo exhibition ‘Find!’ opens at the Small Gallery of Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv on 17 September 2026, presenting ‘Fossils’, a group of paintings made in 2024–25. Running through 17 October, the exhibition begins with an accidental encounter: a fossilised shell or a trace in stone that makes its finder aware of a world far larger than themselves.
Children are the principal figures in Synytsia’s project. Curious and eager to learn, they turn locations from Kyiv’s Troieshchyna outskirts to historic Kudriavka into places for play and discovery. The project recalls Mary Anning, the self-taught child who became a prominent palaeontologist, and makes childhood attention a route toward the distant histories embedded in the ground.
That attention acquires an urgent contemporary register in curator Ania Tasheva’s account of the exhibition. Valuable scientific discoveries, Tasheva writes, are now often encountered by Ukrainian military personnel. The wartime work of building fortifications puts soldiers at the level of archaeological strata, near objects that may enter museum archives, including ancient amphorae and Trypillia ceramics. “There, in the thickness of the soil, they find themselves face to face with the fragility of another’s past and their own present,” Tasheva says.
Synytsia also draws on images of Soviet monumental sculptures for her subjects, including Ernest Kotkov’s ‘Fountain’ and ‘Thumbelina’, by an unknown author. Some of the objects used as visual references have already been destroyed. Synytsia has said that the sculptures’ waves and pearl-like forms recall landscapes from a distant past: a time before mass extinctions, when animals lived among seas and rocks.
The artist is from Sievierodonetsk, in Ukraine’s Luhansk region, and now lives and works in Kyiv. Working primarily in painting, she pays particular attention to monumental techniques, including mural painting. Her works also depict architectural structures and landscapes, focusing on the emptiness and decay of such spaces and objects.
The Small Gallery will close during an air-raid alert.
