VOLOSHYN GALLERY

Voloshyn Gallery presents a group exhibition by a young generation of Ukrainian artists: Between the Breaths of the Walls Doors Open Inward. A project explores the condition of existing within absurdity as a new, enforced norm. Contemporary existence in Ukraine is increasingly described through the category of paradox: a person inhabits a space that is simultaneously a refuge and a zone of risk. They perform actions that have lost their original meaning for the sake of preserving a sense of the mundane. The group exhibition project Between the Breaths of the Walls Doors Open Inward examines precisely this condition, existing within absurdity as a new, enforced norm. Eight young Ukrainian artists, Diana Demianenko, Nika Shumeiko, Maria Charkina, Artem Deineka, Nikol Davydova, Anna Vekhnyk, Daryna Sviatun, and Oleg Savin, turn to the image of a room as a conceptual model of contemporary experience. The room here does not function as a neutral backdrop; it operates as a structure that accumulates contradictions within its very existence, between safety and danger, between familiarity and its dissolution, between the need for calm and the impossibility of achieving it. The objects and images that fill this space retain the morphology of familiar things, yet are stripped of their utilitarian certainty. Transformed into artifacts that resist use, they extend the reality of the contemporary person, a person compelled to live in a space whose form bears no relation to normalcy, yet continues to perform something genuine and correct. They allude to the recognizable while refusing to be it, and it is precisely in this gap between the familiar and the undefined that a space for reflection opens. The exhibition makes no claim to therapeutic effect and offers no catharsis. It records the condition of existing within prolonged uncertainty, where irony and play with meaning are not a departure from reality, but one of the ways of holding on within it. Absurdity here is not an artistic device; it is the precise name for an experience that resists all other definitions. Doors open inward. This compels us to take a step back before leaving.

Always Looking at Palm Trees - A Botanical Conversation marks the first presentation in the United States of this new ensemble of work by Mehdi-Georges Lahlou (b. 1983, Les Sables-d'Olonne) as well as the French-Moroccan artist's debut exhibition in Miami. Working across sculpture, installation, photography, drawing, and printmaking, Mehdi-Georges Lahlou approaches identity, history, and heritage as shifting and unstable fields intersected by questions of race, colonial histories, gender, and ecological precarity. His practice disorients and reimagines history and memory not as a fixed archive, but as mutable material shaped by the urgencies of the present. This body of work is Mehdi-Georges Lahlou's conceptual departure from The Conference of the Birds, the twelfth-century Sufi poem by the Persian mystic Farid ud-Din Attar. In Attar's allegorical narrative, birds gather in search of the legendary Simorgh, only to discover that they themselves are what they seek. Mehdi-Georges Lahlou's adaptation makes a crucial substitution: the gathering becomes a conference of palms and we are invited to seek them out. Among the world's oldest flowering plants and ripe for metaphor, the palm tree has been a significant and recurrent motif in Mehdi-Georges Lahlou's work. Using the palm, the artist has developed a varied visual vocabulary that plumbs its resonances and connotations, taking into account the palms in the proximity to his exhibitions. In Miami, native species such as the Florida Royal Palm and Cabbage Palm coexist alongside imported varieties like the Coconut Palm, introduced as the city cultivated an image of tropical leisure and escape. With this context in mind, Mehdi-Georges Lahlou activates the palm as a sensitive barometer of migration, climate change, and colonial afterlives, placing its symbolic associations of paradise and pleasure alongside histories of displacement and extraction. Moving fluidly between embodiment and metaphor, the artist's own body assumes vegetal forms, ashes obscure images of colonial violence, and queer performers animate hybrid presences. Through these gestures, memory becomes an active site of inquiry where historical residues and contemporary realities continually reconfigure one another. In Always Looking at Palm Trees - A Botanical Conversation, palms do not merely populate the landscape; they bear witness to it and what has been done to it. Silent yet enduring, they become living archives through which Mehdi-Georges Lahlou invites us to reconsider how memories and histories are narrated, inhabited, and carried into uncertain futures. Text by Conor Moynihan Bonacossa

Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in NADA Ceramics, a curated art and design showcase organized by the New Art Dealers Alliance, taking place March 6–8, 2025, at The Locker Room in Tribeca. The gallery will present a focused selection of ceramic works by Abi Shehu. Shehu’s practice examines the face as an unstable site where identity, control, and embodiment begin to fracture. Central to the work is the mouth, which emerges not as a vehicle of expression but as a volatile threshold where interiority pushes outward. Detached from the order of the face, the mouth becomes a void or wound, exposing a body that resists containment and struggles to articulate its own condition. Across the presented works, teeth slip out of alignment and structures distort, signaling the breakdown of familiar hierarchies between face and body. The sculptures rest on undulating ceramic forms that evoke bodies under pressure, shaped by forces that remain unseen. Drawing on biographical references, including the recurring figure of the missing tooth, Shehu weaves personal narrative into broader reflections on fragility, migration, and belonging. Together, the works presented at NADA Ceramics position the mouth as both witness and agent of disorder. Through a restrained yet psychologically charged sculptural language, Shehu invites viewers to consider what surfaces when expression fails and the body asserts itself beyond the limits imposed upon it.

Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to announce One more dawn, Svitlana Ratoshnyuk solo exhibition. The project engages with the consequences of the Russo-Ukrainian war, not by documenting the actual events, but by understanding the war as a process of long-term erasure of forms, images and familiar signs. The artist turns to a reduced, almost symbolic language of images, where silhouette, color and process become key. Her works form a space of tension between the recognizable and the disturbing. Landscape, symbols and objects interact, forming a nonlinear chronicle. The black paper cut-outs of the series Sriblyansky Forest and Sunflower ​​appeal to the image of the Ukrainian landscape as a space of loss. Sriblyansky Forest, a famous location in the Kharkiv region, is now almost destroyed as a result of military action and constant shelling, currently appearing as a fragmented, “burnt-out” silhouette. The forest exists in the paper cut-outs as a mere shadow of its former self. In the Sunflower series, endless fields are transformed into a rhythmic line of repeating forms. It becomes a continuous movement along the territory that has lost its idyllic nature and has been turned into a zone of silent observation. At the heart of the exhibition is the Kyiv Dawn installation made of black polyethylene film, resembling a festive air balloon, a familiar object present at numerous children's celebrations. Its shape is immediately recognizable as the head of Mickey Mouse. The polyethylene material, associated with rubbish or death, comes into sharp conflict with the celebratory shape. Joy and anxiety coexist next to an all-absorbing emptiness. During the exhibition, the balloon transforms, gradually losing its shape, deflating, becoming devoid of its identity and creating an amorphous presence. This transformation becomes a reflection of the depreciation and destruction of symbols of security and joy in conditions of war and conflict. The red spots on the walls function as ambiguous symbols that can be interpreted as future dawns, danger signals, or traces of violence. The material texture emphasizes the tension, transforming the color into an independent bearer of meaning. Svitlana Ratoshniuk’s works form a realm on the threshold between festivity and desolation, where familiar images exist in a state of gradual disintegration. It is a condition of unstable equilibrium, in which the boundaries between opposing poles are constantly blurred. This zone functions as a transitional field where the experience of loss becomes a key means of understanding reality.

Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to present Who's there, old question, who's here, a group exhibition curated by Harold Mendez. The exhibition includes works by Nikita Kadan, Ronny Quevedo, José de Jesús Rodriguez, and Rodrigo Valenzuela, which examine how evolving narratives and boundaries intersect with questions of inheritance, embodiment, and trace. The exhibition proposes new perspectives while forming a network of philosophical and poetic inquiries. Through this group exhibition Mendez explores the relationship between Europe and Latin America due to exile, war and migration, citing he was "curious how these recurring issues and their consequences are being dealt with now, particularly through a contemporary, diasporic perspective." The title Who's there, old question, who's here foregrounds questions of presence and address, asking how identities are recognized and positioned in relation to history and autonomy. It suggests a shift from inherited narratives toward living, and/or lived experiences. Each work emphasizes the immediacy of the present while remaining attentive to what persists or lingers. Serving as an anchor for the exhibition, Rodrigo Valenzuela's Devil's Union #6 establishes the entry point into the encounter that recurs throughout the presentation. The photograph stages two devil-like figures in a moment of concentrated exchange, their gestures oscillating between collaboration and uncertainty. In this way, Valenzuela's image not only stages a moment of collective action, but also implicates the viewer as a potential third presence, drawing them into a negotiation of engagement vs. complicity. José de Jesús Rodríguez creates a moment of demand through richly painted and detailed vignettes in which violent histories collide with contemporary narratives, probing the inheritance and identity that shape them. The laborer's pitchforks in Nikita Kadan's sculptures are recontextualized into charged, weaponized forms. His drawings of winged sirens extend this notion, exploring dissonance, death, and loss into mythical motifs. In Quevedo's abstraction of the body, he traces movement and the marks of experience across the Americas, extending the exhibition's meditation on experiencing and living through the inherited. By offering us alternative modes of mapping, Quevedo's mixed-media works are positioned as conduits where re-imagined selves and localities are continuously being re-interpreted.