It’s perhaps the most timely art exhibit in the city of Miami — and it almost didn’t happen.
“We decided to open the pop-up before the war — it was a very spontaneous decision,” said Julia Voloshyn, co-founder of Voloshyn gallery.
The exhibit is titled "The Memory on Her Face," and it’s run out of a warehouse-turned-impromptu gallery in Allapattah on NW 23rd Street.
It features the work of five Ukrainian artists on Russian aggression in their homeland.
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“It became our peaceful protest against war,” Voloshyn said.
One work by artist Nikita Kadam features a silk-screened photo of a building in the Donbas region of Ukraine shortly after it was bombed back in 2014.
“When Russia supported Ukraine separatists and Russian army came to Donbas, many buildings many lives were destroyed,” Max Voloshyn said.
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The silkscreen is attached to a metal shield — it’s meant to represent the fragility of life.
Husband and wife Max and Julia Voloshyn set up the exhibition in late January. They were originally scheduled to go back to Kyiv in December but stayed in Miami after contracting COVID during Art Basel.
After recovering in January, they set up this exhibition as a pop-up on a whim — they had no idea war was about to break out.
The couple is now unable to go home, where they run their own gallery back in Kyiv. The gallery is in a historic building and during the Second World War, it was a bomb shelter.
That gallery is now once again a bomb shelter, where artists and gallery employees take refuge.
