Looking into the Gaps IV

OPENING HOURS AND TICKET PRICES

Opening: February 21, 2026, at 7:00 PM. Free admission.
Exhibition schedule:
February 21, 2026 – May 17, 2026
Opening hours: Mon – closed, Tue-Fri 12:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-20:00
*opening hours will vary, details coming soon on the website and social media of Jam Factory Art Center

Tickets can be purchased at the Art Center’s reception. Every Tuesday, entry is free for all visitors.
Tickets: 200 UAH
Half-price tickets for schoolchildren, students, internally displaced persons and senior citizens.
Free entrance for children under 7 years old, people with disabilities, veterans, military personnel, students of the Academies of Arts, Trush College, and Lviv cultural studies departments.
The exhibition operates during power outages.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Looking into the Gaps is an exhibition cycle that approaches the history and present of Ukrainian art as an ornament of ruptures, losses, and absences, in which what exists serves merely as a frame for what is missing.

The cycle consists of separate chapters, previously presented at Voloshyn Gallery in Kyiv (2024); the Artsvit and DCCC spaces in Dnipro (2025); ART FRONT Gallery in Tokyo, Japan (2026); as well as landscape exhibitions in Sokołowsko (Poland), Berlin (Germany), and on the island of Teshima in Japan. The aim of the cycle is to reflect on the process of moving along a conscious path composed largely of obstacles, and on the construction of a coherent narrative that breaks off again and again.

The central motif of the Lviv part of the project, presented at Jam Factory Art Center, is the theme of loneliness and the relationship between the “I” and the “we” as shaped by the experience of war.

Artists

Andrii Boyko, Andrii Boiarov, Andrii Sahaidakovskyi, Anton Saienko, Attila Hazhlinsky, Bohdan Sokur, Bohdana Kosmina, Vasyl Tkachenko, Vesela Naidenova, Vladyslav Plisetskyi, Volodymyr Vorotnov, Halyna Zhehulska, Davyd Chychkan, Dana Kavelina, Zhanna Kadyrova, Zoriana Kozak, Illia Todurkin, Kateryna Yermоlaieva, Katia Kopieikina, Kseniia Hnylytska, Maiia Nikolaieva, Marharyta Polovinko, Mariia Prymachenko, Marta Syrko, Myroslav Yahoda, Mykhailo Palinchak, Nikita Kadan, Oleh Holosii, Oleh Perkovskyi, Oleksandr Hnylytskyi, Olia Yeriemieieva, Pavlo Bedzir, Pavlo Kovach, Pavlo Makov, Sasha Dolhyi, Sevilia Nariman-Kyzy, Serhii Anufriev, Stanislav Turina, Fedir Tetianych, Yurii Bolsa, Yurii Izdryk, Yurii Leiderman, Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei, Yaroslav Futymskyi.

Project architect: Bohdana Kosmina

‘We generally didn’t like to look into the distance. Rather, to the side, into the gap. Like the perspective of pretty streets that always diverge perpendicularly. We didn’t interpret, we didn’t even ‘practice’, we just wandered around.’ — Yuri Leiderman, “Those Who Wandered in the Surf”
The history of Ukrainian art is a torn history and, at the same time, a history of gaps. Interrupted narratives, destroyed works, repressed authors, loud silence, rewriting the past according to the new dominant ideology, tragedies of conformism and virtuosity of self-justification, breaking oneself over the knee, changing sides in the middle of an argument, changing names halfway through, dissociative identity. Or martyrdom through self-immolation, followed by turning the ashes into bronze. And bronze is known to steal the meaning from ashes every time.
Is it possible to wander the landscape of catastrophe? Are there flankers in the bloody lands? The answer to this exhibition is affirmative.
The dignity of living on the periphery, without an eager gaze directed to the centre, to the metropolis. The lack of any certainty about one’s own historical prospects. Leiderman speaks of ‘Ukrainian horizontal kinship, non-hierarchical ties’ and ‘a number of cultural provinces – Kyiv, Odesa, Lviv, Kharkiv – that do not need a centre, they just stand side by side’**. Art in the provinces can be ‘elusive Joe’ while in the metropolis it turns into career springboards or monumental columns and towers of ‘big culture’.
But the province is also the cradle of madness. Ideas that in more central places could turn into unshakable pedestals for their creators here become the clamorous garb of a urban madmen. Something like Tetianych’s spacesuits made of garbage and foil.
Let’s imagine a museum, one of the Ukrainian museums, where a seemingly chaotic collection of artworks turns into a clear history of gaps of the logics that could otherwise unite and historicise these works. Where the lack of connection between historical situations makes the present fluid, unreliable and extremely open.
What to do when your native periphery suddenly becomes a place where the fate of the world is decided? And an even more complicated question: what if it suddenly ceases to be this place?
This exhibition is about the ways of looking at art, determined by the terrific and funny circumstances of Ukrainian life. This exhibition can be read as a project of a museum in which the desire to claim power through writing history has already failed. Or as an unstable system in which “classical,” “contemporary,” “marginal,” “popular” authors find themselves outside their usual niches and positions in the classification. Like a moving landscape of art that instantly makes any map obsolete. Or as a story about the stolen past, recreated by its shadows and echoes – with full readiness for these shadows and echoes to deceive you and lead you astray.
Work on the fourth chapter of the exhibition began with reflections on the relationship between “we” and “I” in a time of war. The necessity of self-limitation and its forms, (dis)agreement with new externally imposed restrictions, and the role of self-censorship and mutual surveillance—these topics are not debatable in the conventional sense. Different positions on them cannot peacefully coexist within a single field. It is precisely from these tensions that cracks emerge, into which relationships, shared languages of understanding, and prospects for coexistence fall.
Yet the subsequent movement of thought led to something more elementary—to the theme of loneliness in a world permeated by war and, at the same time, newly normalized. And then, link by link, to an entire chain of lonelinesses: from loneliness within history (absent or incessantly, compulsively rewritten); to loneliness inside a social contract that is constantly betrayed by collective habit; from loneliness within the Ukrainian artistic field, with its continual oscillation between a pull toward institutional care and a desire for anti-institutional emancipation—to loneliness between art history and the hysteria of artistic life.
Ultimately, this trajectory leads to a connection between loneliness and autonomy, and then returns once again to the beginning. To the irreducible remainder of “we.” To purified, fragile forms of the shared, without which everything else proves impossible.”

Nikita Kadan