Izolyatsia, an arts fund once based in war-torn Donetsk, is staging its first exhibition in Ukraine’s capital. Kyiv Post reports

Izolyatsia, an arts fund once based in Donetsk, has started a new life in Kiev – the latest relocation forced by the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Last summer, Russia-backed separatist fighters seized the former insulation factory in Donetsk where the art centre been located for four years. Izolyatsia says the separatists destroyed works that did not fit with their ideology and may have converted some of the art to scrap metal.

Now, Izolyatsia is holding its first exhibition in Kiev after fleeing.

Entitled Revision, the exhibition includes works from Belarusian artists and runs until 6 February. It shows part of the collection that Izolyatsia staff were able to take from their centre in Donetsk before fleeing eastern Ukraine. More of the saved art objects can be seen in the Collection section on the website of Izolyatsia.

“It is those works that we were allowed to take out from the occupied territory, about 1/3 of what we had. These are mainly paintings and photographs – something that could be easily transferred and loaded into the car,” Alesya Bolot, a representative of Izolyatsia, said.

Many of the larger works remain in Donetsk. Among them is a project by the French artist Daniel Buren, consisting of 124 metal grids that were used for storage and transportation of mineral wool at the factory.

“We certainly do not know what happened to those works, but most of them are made of metal, and we know that the metal components of the plant have been cut out and converted to scrap,” Bolot says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Part of the new exhibition in Kiev Photograph: Izolyatsia

On 9 June last year, Roman Lyagin, an official in the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic, promised that the artworks would not be damaged when separatist forces began occupying the Izolyatsia centre. The next day it was looted, property vandalised and equipment taken.

Today, Izolyatsia is based in a Kiev shipyard.



“There [in Donetsk] we were based at the former factory for the production of insulation materials, worked with space, with the history of the plant and the city,” says Bolot. “Industrial context is very close to us and we love it. Arriving [in] Kiev, we visited a lot of spaces... but eventually found a place in the industrial zone at the Podil. We can see pipes, valves, manufacturers from our windows. This kind of view has always inspired us,” Bolot says. The organisation doesn’t know how long it will stay in Kiev.

In December, Izolyatsia presented Culture and Conflict: Izolyatsia in Exile in Paris. The exhibition included interviews with blogger Dmitry Potekhin and artist Sergei Zakharov, who were both arrested and detained by separatists.



Zakharov’s street art installations in Donetsk offered parodies of separatist leaders, such as a “House of Cards” creation depicting separatists and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The message: the separatists exist only because of the Russian leader’s patronage.

The exhibition aroused interest among Ukrainian and international media. After that, Izolyatsia received several offers from foreign cultural institutions to create similar exhibitions in New York and Berlin.

A version of this article first appeared on Kyiv Post