Pedagogies of War marks the first major institutional presentation in Spain of the Ukrainian duo Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, whose work has emerged as one of the most searching artistic responses to the realities of contemporary conflict. Curated by Chus Martínez and organised with TBA21 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation), the exhibition examines how war reshapes perception, public space and the ethics of looking, through slow, unsettling encounters with mediated reality.
Working primarily with moving image, Khimei and Malashchuk operate in the unstable territory between documentary and fiction, where evidence becomes image and image becomes burden. Across the exhibition’s multichannel installations, war is presented as an ecology that infiltrates everyday life, memory and identity. Surveillance footage, cinematic framing and deliberate stillness fracture any sense of narrative comfort, asking viewers to confront their own position as witnesses.
The newly commissioned Open World (2025) offers one of the exhibition’s most affecting gestures. A military robotic dog, repurposed as a conduit for memory, allows a displaced Ukrainian teenager to navigate his former neighbourhood remotely. What might read as technological mediation becomes a deeply human act: a fragile attempt to reconnect with place, friendship and loss. The work quietly reframes surveillance as intimacy, without resolving the ethical tension this inversion produces.
Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei. Left: Open World, (2025). Right: We Didn’t Start this War (2026), the commission produced for the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. Here, the banality of everyday life is suspended and displaced by an imagination shaped by the constant proximity of violence.
This tension is more starkly exposed in You Shouldn’t Have to See This (2024), a silent installation depicting children who were forcibly transferred to Russian territory and later returned. The images hover uncomfortably between tenderness and violation, raising urgent questions about the aesthetics of war imagery and the limits of empathy. Here, Martínez’s curatorial restraint is crucial, allowing the work’s moral unease to remain unresolved.
Completing the exhibition, The Wanderer (2022) draws on Romantic landscape painting to interrogate the historical entanglement of nationalism, aesthetics and violence. By inserting lifeless bodies into sublime scenery, Khimei and Malashchuk expose how cultural memory can conceal brutality beneath beauty.
There is no question that some viewers will find Pedagogies of War uncomfortable; that is the point. This is a show that insists on doubt; an exhibition that refuses distance, reminding us wars are not only fought on battlefields, but also absorbed into the ways we see, remember and forget.
museothyssen.org
Words: Lina Ress
Lead image: Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, In Absentia, a selection of film works created between 2022 and 2025, all of which deal with the events that took place since the attack on the young Ukrainian democracy
Other current art exhibitions reviewed and recommended by I-M Inquisitive Minds include Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting (National Portrait Gallery, London) and Metamorphoses (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).
Show Comments +