At the Art Donbass exhibition center last week, a show of new works by the Union of Young Artists was unveiled with a series of speeches and a soulful rendition of “I Will Survive.”

“Song suits the situation very well,” Katerina Kalinichenko, the gallery’s director, remarked dryly.

The title of the show was “Hope, Belief and Love,” and the work was generally sunny and upbeat. Kseniya Shevchenko, the union’s chief, said only seven of its 10 members remained in Donetsk. “I try not to let the war influence my work,” she said. “It is so gray, so gloomy.”

Image A woman covered the body of a man who was killed Wednesday during shelling in a residential area of Donetsk. Credit... Dominique Faget/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

At the Donetsk State Circus complex south of the city center, its circular facade and soaring windows caked with dirt, Juriy N. Kukuzenko, the director, walked forlornly around the empty center ring.

In normal times, the circus could draw on a regional population of five million. But as town after town has emptied out ahead of the fighting, the audience has shrunk. The circus has not made a profit for a year. Traveling performers stopped coming to the region. For a while, in the fall, the grounds were used as a distribution point for humanitarian aid.

“In the end, we realized, we had enough of feeling afraid all the time,” Mr. Kukuzenko said.

In December, the circus organized a festival for young performers, mostly acrobatic and high-wire acts. More than 120 people participated, and the circus was packed. In January, there was a series of 10 performances, though with only about a third of the number of acts that normally were performed.