Oksana Karpovets is a Ukrainian curator and art historian currently based in Paris. She has curated a number of exhibitions, including When the Inconceivable Takes Form (2023), Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; Human (2023)(with Edyta Wolska), Bałtycka Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej, Słupsk; Index (2021-2022), Voloshyn Gallery, Kyiv. Oksana completed professional training at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and has held curatorial positions at the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, New Jersey and the Jam Factory Art Centre in Lviv, Ukraine. She holds an MA in Museum Studies from New York University and is currently working on her dissertation entitled: Ukrainian Video Art (the 1980s-2020s): An Inter-media Instrument for Emancipation, Re-politicisation and Social Change at the Sorbonne University, Paris.

Oksana Zabuzhko (b.1960) is Ukraine’s major contemporary writer, the author of more than twenty books of different genres (poetry, fiction, essays, criticism). She made her poetry debut at the age of 12, yet, as her parents had been blacklisted during the Soviet purges of the 1970s, it was not until the perestroika that her first book was published. She graduated from the department of philosophy of Kyiv Shevchenko University, obtained her PhD in philosophy of arts, and has worked as a research associate for the Institute of Philosophy of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In the early 1990s she lectured in the USA as a Fulbright Fellow and a Writer-in-Residence at Penn State University, Harvard University, and University of Pittsburgh. After the publication of her novel Field Work in Ukrainian Sex (1996), which in 2006 was named “the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence”, she has been living as a free-lance author, and has for years been listed by the media among Ukraine’s top 100 most influential people.
O. Zabuzhko’s books have been translated into Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swedish. Among her numerous acknowledgements are Angelus Central European Literary Prize (2013), Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine (2019), French Order of the Legion of Honor (2023), and many other national and international awards.

Oksana Briukhovetska was born and lived most of her life in Ukraine. She obtained her degree from the National Academy of Visual Arts and Architecture in Kyiv. In 2023 she completed her MFA at Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan, USA. In Ukraine she worked as an artist, designer and curator, and wrote about art for Ukrainian and international journals. From 2009-2019 she was a member of the Visual Culture Research Center in Kyiv. In her curatorial practice she explored social challenges in Ukraine and East Europe in the exhibitions such as Ukrainian Body (2012), Lockout (2014), I am Ukrainka poster campaign in Warsaw (2018). She is known for her feminist international curatorial and artistic projects Motherhood; What in Me is Feminine? (2015); TEXTUS. Embroidery, Textile, Feminism; Women’s Texts (2017). She is a co-editor of the book “The Right to Truth. Conversations on Art and Feminism” (2019), and a co-curator of the Ukrainian chapter of the Secondary Archive, Platform for women artists from Central and Eastern Europe. In 2022 she became a recipient of The Igor Zabel Award Grant for Culture and Theory. During the last few years she lived in the US and extensively worked with textile collage. Her project Songs and Flowers for Ukraine (2022) was her response to the Russian war in Ukraine, in which she reflects on grief and intergenerational trauma of war. In 2022 she became a recipient of The Igor Zabel Award Grant for Culture and Theory. O. Briukhovetska is also a finalist of The Hopwood Graduate Fiction Award and a winner of Chamberlain Writing Award.

Anna Scherbyna (b. 1988, Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine) is an artist, illustrator and curator. Her practice examines the critical potential of a medium such as installation and video, drawing and painting. Her works cover a wide range of topics including natural landscapes and their political connotations, gender performativity and violence. She also shows interest and sensitivity in the distribution of power and knowledge and uses imagination to envision possible futures. A. Scherbyna graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv and studied at the Course of Art in Kyiv. She participated in numerous exhibitions and film-festivals including Woman at War, Fridman gallery, New York (2022); Imagine Ukraine – Art as a Critical Attitude, M HKA, Antwerp (2022) and The Portal, VBKÖ, Vienna (2021). As a member of different curatorial groups A. Scherbyna organized exhibitions such as How Do We Turn Salt Into Sugar? in Berlin (2023) and The Cave of the Golden Rose in Kyiv (2019). She also cofounded a reading club for artists and theoreticians Chytanka (since 2020). A. Scherbyna was nominated for the Pinchuk Art Prize in 2020. She is currently studying in the Meistershüle program in the class of Clemens von Wedemeyer “Expanded Cinema” in Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig.

We would like to thank the Ukrainian Institute in France for its support.