VENETI — The 78 bronze funnels were ready, the pump tested and the background was almost ready. So when it looked like Ukraine might go to war, Maria Lanko, one of the curators of the Ukrainian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, was determined to get the fountain sculpture by artist Pavlo Makov safely out of the country.
In a recent interview in New York, Lanko described loading the funnels into three boxes and putting them in her car. “We expected something to start,” she said. “There was a lot of tension and Putin gave us a lot of hints.”
On the evening of the first day of the war, when explosions besieged the city, Lanko set out from Kiev with her dog and a colleague, the art director of the pavilion, Sergiy Mishakin. “I started the journey without a precise route,” Lanko said. “I had to decide which way was the safest.”
Thus began a harrowing three-week journey—driving 10 hours a day on back roads, staying in places without heat—that eventually took Lanko out of Ukraine and to Vienna, where the sculpture’s materials were sent onward to Italy.
“It is thanks to her that we are here now,” Makov said in an interview in Venice this month. “She took all these funnels and said, ‘We’ll do it anyway.’ And then we got to work and we did it,” he said.
It wasn’t that simple: Seventy-eight funnels are not a fountain in and of themselves. They had to be fitted with modern hydraulics and there were restrictions on installing those in the historic Arsenale where the work will be displayed. With only weeks to go before the opening of the Biennale, the trustees had to find a company that could assemble the structure in time.
Back in Kharkov, in northeastern Ukraine, where he lives, Makov had considered staying there. But after days of bombings — and concerned about his 92-year-old mother refusing to leave her fourth-floor hallway downtown — he decided to get his family to safety.
makov; his wife; his mother; Tatiana Borzunova, the graphic designer of the pavilion’s catalogue; her mother; and a cat all stacked in his car, with only a few personal belongings, choices dictated by the madness of the moment. “You open the drawers and you think what you want to take with you and you understand that you don’t want to take anything,” he recalls. “I didn’t bring anything. I left everything behind.”
They too went via Vienna to Venice, where a home for the mothers was found.
In the meantime, Lanko had found a company in Milan to create the fountain’s structure. It cost significantly more than she budgeted, and she said the Biennale was stepping up to pay for it.
“Mary can go through the wall if she needs to,” Makov said.
The edifice arrived in Venice last week, just in time for the preview of the Biennale. The event will be open to the public on Saturday and will run through November 27.
The installation for the Ukrainian Pavilion – titled “Fountain of Exhaustion” – is an updated version of a sculpture made by Makov in 1995.
It consists of a two-meter pyramid of descending rows of funnels, the spouts of which carry water to the funnels below. Water flows into the top funnel, but by the time it gets to the lowest tier, the flow has slowed down to a trickle.
Makov had the idea for the fountain in 1994, he said. He was inspired by the local situation in Kharkov in the first difficult years after the collapse of the Soviet Union: “There was a lack of willpower in society, this lack of vitality,” he said, that the city’s fountains, it was not working at the time, seemed to manifest itself.
The title of the work reflects “what I was feeling at the time,” he said.
He made other versions over the years. One, exhibited at the National Gallery in Kiev in 2003, was bought by the Pinchuk Art Center, a private museum in the city, and a huge version with more than 200 funnels was shown in 2017 in Lviv, in western Ukraine.
With each iteration, its meaning broadened, to symbolize “the lack of vitality in Europe and the exhaustion of man in a democratic world,” Makov said.
And with the Biennale installation, the message has once again undergone a metamorphosis.
“It connects with Venice, because the city is in a state of exhaustion,” Mavok said. Take out the tourist industry, “and there’s nothing left.” This version was a “tribute to the city. It may be sad, but it’s fair.”
The fragility of the watery city, embroiled in a battle against increasingly hostile elements, strikes another chord, Makov said, “our exhaustion with our relationship with nature.”
How the war in Ukraine affects the cultural world
Valentin Silvestrov. Ukraine’s most famous living composer, Silvestrov, moved from his home in Kiev to Berlin, where he now resides. In recent weeks, his comforting music has taken on new meaning for listeners in his war-torn country.
“Now we are all concerned about the war, but three years ago we were very concerned that the ice is melting. And the ice is still melting, and in 10 years it will still be melting,” he said. “We don’t take responsibility for our relationships with nature,” he said.
Since arriving in Venice a month ago, Makov said he has taken on the unexpected role of national spokesman. “I don’t feel like an artist here, I feel much more like a citizen of Ukraine, and that it is my duty that Ukraine is represented at the Biennale,” he said.
Lanko said this year’s Biennale was an important moment for Ukraine, the opportunity to showcase the country’s artistic talent and convey the message that a country under siege can still make a creative contribution. “There is no knowledge about Ukrainian culture and art in the world,” she said. “It is still considered part of the Russian cultural space. Being in places like Venice allows us to speak with our art and our words.”
In the Giardini, the gardens where most major countries have their Biennale pavilions, Lanko has also realized an open-air installation called “Piazza Ucraina”, together with the other curators of the Ukrainian Pavilion, Borys Filonenko and Lizaveta German.
The installation consists of a series of pillars covered with posters, screened by the curators, reflecting on the war. In the center, a mock-up of a monument covered in sandbags symbolizes Ukraine’s efforts to protect its heritage.
Roberto Cicutto, the president of the Biennale, said in a statement that it was “a space dedicated to Ukrainian artists and their resistance to aggression” that “will help raise awareness among the world about the war and all that comes with it.” .
Cecilia Alemani, curator of the Biennale’s main exhibition, said that during its 127-year existence, the event had “recorded the shocks and revolutions of history like a seismograph. Our hope is that with ‘Piazza Ucraina’ we can create a platform of solidarity for the people of Ukraine on the Earth of the Giardini.”
As long as the war continues, so will the uncertainty; Makov said he wasn’t sure of what comes next. After the opening of the Biennale on Saturday, “there are no plans at all, and I decided not to even think about it. I’ll see,” he said.
Lanko said she hoped she could return to Kiev soon. For now – though she continues to worry about her family and friends back home – she’s trying to focus on the positive: she’s made it to Venice with Makov’s work; the Ukrainian pavilion will not be empty. “I wake up, give myself an hour to cry and then do things,” she said. “It was important to finally make it, despite the circumstances. Not everyone has the chance to leave Ukraine and have a voice.”