Valeriia Zubatenko is a Ukrainian multidisciplinary artist, curator, educator, and researcher whose practice confronts the politics of war, memory, and representation. Working primarily with installation, text, sound, and performance, her work emerges from a deep engagement with feminist and postcolonial theory, informed by her background in philosophy, pedagogy, and activism.
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Having grown up amidst the rise of far-right violence in Ukraine during the 2010s and later forced into migration by Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Valeriia’s artistic voice is shaped by firsthand experiences of displacement and resistance. Her practice navigates the ethical complexities of representing violence and trauma, challenging dominant historical narratives while rejecting the spectacle of suffering. Instead, she offers alternative frameworks grounded in care, reflection, and solidarity.
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Her ongoing project, Museum of Apocalypse, serves as a conceptual anchor for her recent work — a fictional institution that critically reimagines museology through the lens of war archeology and apocalyptic symbolism. Through ironic yet deeply researched explorations of medieval Christian iconography, the project interrogates how trauma is remembered, justified, and institutionalized in public memory. Rather than producing detached objects, Valeriia constructs spaces and processes that engage participants in shared critical inquiry, creating space for uncomfortable but necessary dialogues.
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Central to her methodology is a commitment to collaborative, non-formal education and inclusive cultural practice. In her workshops and public programs, she centers co-learning, safe communication, and the transformative potential of collective reflection. Whether in gallery spaces or activist contexts, her work invites participants to rethink how violence is seen, felt, and processed — socially, politically, and emotionally.
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Zubatenko’s practice resists the reduction of art to activism, instead positioning it as a complex, situated form of thinking and doing — one that has the power to make visible the unseen, and to question the structures that sustain inequality, colonial legacies, and patriarchal control.
Collection:
Museum of Apocalypse
Museum of Apocalypse — an example of (war) archeology of the future — exists in the form of separate art pieces (installation, text, audio essay, performance), a mix of its parts, or as a whole.
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The artist has created a fictional proposal for the museum and several editions of possible museum rooms in the format of total installations, texts, and soundscapes. This is not only an ironic gesture toward museology, political memory-shaping processes, and the hierarchy of experiences, but also a conceptual framework for her multidisciplinary art practice since the full-scale invasion of russia into Ukraine.
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Drawing on her background in philosophy, Valeriia has deeply researched the Christian category of “apocalypse,” a concept whose language is fitting for discussing war trauma and political dynamics—sometimes directly and often symbolically—through the use of medieval iconography of the Apocalypse.
By engaging with religious, cultural, and political metanarratives as well as local stories, the artist questions the visual representation of war and violence while also exposing the structures behind coping with guilt and the justification of violence. She creates recognizable links between past and present, addressing colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist dimensions.
Part 0.
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Part I. Public Presentation
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Part II. The Most Western Spot
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Part III. Rotting Space
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Part IV. This Was Will Never End
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Part V.
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