Kyiv to LA is a cross-cultural initiative inviting Ukrainian artists and researchers working with moving image to participate in a Los Angeles-based residency and public program.
The project marks a unique collaboration with several Los Angeles organizations including 18th Street Arts Center; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles (ICA LA); GRI Scholars Program; Villa Aurora Thomas Mann House (VATMH); California Institute of Technology (Caltech); The Center for European and Russian Studies, UCLA; The Fulcrum; Art at the Rendon, Human Resources; Los Angeles Filmforum; and e-flux in New York.
Kyiv to LA is made possible by a generous grant from Nora McNeely Hurley and Manitou Fund, together with individual and in-kind donations. The project is fiscally sponsored by 18th Street Arts Center, who also serves as a collaborative partner.
About the participants:
Recognized for their work within Western and Eastern European institutions, biennales, and film festivals, this project marks the first time these artists present their work to West Coast audiences. Working across mediums and interdisciplinary research, their practices build new narratives by deconstructing imperialist mythologies and envisioning new, sustainable futures.
2025 Participants / Forthcoming
Zhanna Kadyrova, Artist, Filmmaker
Darya Tsymbalyuk, Writer, Researcher, Artist
2024 Participants
Nikolay Karabinovych Artist, Filmmaker, Curator
Teta Tsybulnyk Filmmaker and Writer
Elias Parvulesco Filmmaker, Director
Mykola Ridnyi Filmmaker, Curator, Professor
2023 Participants
Asia Bazdyrieva Art Historian, Writer, Researcher
Roman Khimei Filmmaker
Dana Kavelina Artist, Filmmaker
Yarema Malashchuk Filmmaker
Zhanna Ozirna Filmmaker
Oleksiy Radynski Filmmaker, Writer
2024 Programs
March 17
Human Resources, Los Angeles
Screening and dinner with Teta Tsybulnyk, Elias Parvulesco, and Nikolay Karabinovych.
March 27
e-flux and Bar Laika, Brooklyn
DJ and artist Nikolay Karabinovych brings his collection of 45s to weave a journey through time and territories from the shores of the Black Sea to the Scheldt River.
September 22
Los Angeles Filmforum at 2220 Arts & Archive, Los Angeles
Screening and conversation with Mykola Ridnyi. The screening will feature five works spanning the past decade of Ridnyi’s practice.
October 01
e-flux Screening Room, Brooklyn
Screening and conversation with Mykola Ridnyi
2023 Programs:
January 11
Institute of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles
Potluck dinner and screening with artist Yarema Malashchuk. Photos (above) Nick Agro.
February 25
Hall of Nations, Balboa Park, San Diego
Screening and conversation with Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the full-scale invasion, with the House of Ukraine.
March 9
California State University, Northridge
Class lecture and screening with Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk. Open to the public.
March 18
The Fulcrum, Los Angeles
Reconstructing creativity at times of war: Conversation and book sale with the founders of Theater of Hopes and Expectations and fundraising publication Oberih.
March 30
Art at the Rendon, Los Angeles
Screening and conversation with Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk about thier most recent film featuring the looting of the Kherson Museum of Local Lore.
April 06
e-flux Screening Room, Brooklyn
New York premiere of Oleksiy Radynski’s Infinity According to Florian followed by a discussion.
April 20
UCLA, Guest Lecture, Los Angeles
Discussion with art historian Asia Bazdyrieva and filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski as they expand the territory of decolonial discourse by examining Ukraine’s anti-imperial war against Russia. Moderated by sociocultural anthropologist Laurie Kain Hart.
April 23
UCLA James Bridges Theater, Los Angeles
Screening of Infinity According to Florian with Oleksiy Radynski. What is Earth? What is a solar system? What is humanity? Who is Florian Yuriev? Why did he build a UFO building in Kyiv? This film explores the legendary figure of Kyiv-based architect Florian Yuriev and recounts why capitalism is a thing of the past, and what happens when you divide one by infinity.
May 10th
Thomas Mann House, Pacific Palisades
Screening and conversation with VATMH Distinguished Visitor, filmmaker Dana Kavelina featuring two films: Letter to Turtledove (2020) and her most recent work, It can't be that nothing can be returned (2022), a science fiction video set in post-war Ukraine.
May 17
Caltech, Pasadena
Screening and lecture with art historian and researcher Asia Bazdyrieva. Bazdyrieva will address key questions which sit at the core of Geocinema — a documentary-led research project that reframes Earth sensing and imaging processes.
June 01
e-flux Screening Room, Brooklyn
Art historian and researcher Asia Bazdyrieva will speak about resourcification, extractivist policies, and the sociotechnical imaginaries of the future as a follow-up to her 2022 e-flux article, No Milk, No Love.
July 9
Private Residence, Pasadena
Outdoor screening with Zhanna Ozirna featuring Encounter (2016), The Adult (2019), Grace (2017), and current work in progress, Ground Zero. Hosted by artist and writer Julia Tcharfas, this event celebrates the culmination of Kyiv to LA, 2023.
Press: KCRW, Hyperallergic, Deutschlandfunk
Forthcoming Artists/ 2025:
Kadyrova’s practice engages various disciplines including sculpture, photo, video, and performance. In her work, the issue of context unravels to reveal the rhythm of History on the move - that of a world whose multiple layers disappear behind their immediacy. Often diverting the aesthetic canons of the socialist ideal still present in the heritage of contemporary Ukraine, Kadyrova’s perspective is partially informed by the plastic and symbolic values of urban building materials. Thus ceramics, glass, stone, and concrete enter the spotlight of her work.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at Kunstverein Hannover (Germany), Stavanger Museum (Norway) Kunstforum Wien (Austria), Eretz Israel Museum Tel Aviv (Israel), Centre Pompidou, Palais Tokyo; La Kunsthalle Mulhouse (all France), Kunstraum Innsbruck (Austria) Ludwig Museum, Budapest (Hungary), Museum of Modern Art; Uyazdovski Castle, Warsaw (both Poland), Spinnerei Leipzig; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe; DAAD, Zimmerstrabe, Berlin (all Germany), the National Union of Cuban Architects and Construction Engineers, Havana (Cuba), Sara Hilden Museum, Tampere (Finnland), Lviv Municipal Art Center, Lviv, National Art Museum of Ukraine and PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv (all Ukraine).
https://www.kadyrova.com/
Darya Tsymbalyuk is an interdisciplinary researcher, whose practice includes writing and image-making. Most of Darya’s work lies at the intersection of environmental humanities and artistic research, but she has also written on embodied knowledge, coloniality of knowledge and colonial legacies, whiteness, (post)industrial heritage, and visual arts. Darya is the author of the forthcoming book Ecocide in Ukraine: the Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity Press 2025), in which she offers an intimate portrait of her beloved homeland against the backdrop of Russia’s war and ecocide. Her first book, Limits of Collaboration: Art, Ethics, and Donbas, was co-written with Victoria Donovan in collaboration with artists and curators Dmytro Chepurnyi, Viktor “Corwic” Zasypkin, Oleksandr Kuchynskyi, and Kateryna Siryk (Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Ukraine, 2022). Her shorter essays and academic articles appeared in BBC Future Planet, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of International Relations and Development, Arcadia: Environment & Society Portal, The Funambulist Magazine: Politics of Space and Bodies, REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, IWMpost, and more. A double special issue on environmental humanities of Ukraine she co-edited with Tanya Richardson is forthcoming with East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies.
In addition to writing, Darya also works with images through drawing, painting, collage, and film essays. Her visual work was featured at the 5th Odes(s)a Biennale of Contemporary Art, Kyiv Biennial 2023, The Württembergische Kunstverein Stuttgart, and Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture, among other places. She is currently working on drawings and paintings of endangered endemic steppe plants.
https://daryatsymbalyuk.com/
Past Artists / 2024:
Nikolay Karabinovych (b. 1988, Odesa, Ukraine) works across various media such as video installation, performance, sound, and sculpture. He explores the social histories of Eastern Europe, approaching collective and personal memory by means of analytical, conceptual or interventionist tactics.
In 2020 he graduated from the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) in Ghent. Karabinovych was an assistant curator of the 5th Odesa Biennale. In 2022, 2020 and 2018, he was awarded the first PinchukArtCentre Prize.
His work has been shown extensively at public institutions (M UHKA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; HKW, Berlin, Belgium Jewish Museum, Bozar, Brussels; w139, Amsterdam; Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw; Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv; and many others) and in galleries (Hunt Kastner gallery, Prague; Voloshyn Gallery, Kyiv; Hit Gallery, Bratislava and others) He has also participated in the Kaunas Biennale (2023), the Kyiv Biennale (2023, 2021) and in parallel program of 59th Venice Biennale.
https://karabinovych.com/
Teta Tsybulnyk is an artist and psychoanalyst based in Kyiv. With a background in sociology, social anthropology and clinical psychology, her research investigates the non-human gaze on nature and semiotics of the unconscious. Tsybulnyk is the co-founder of ruїns collective, an art and film union established with Elias Parvulsco and Oleg Isakov (2017-2021). ruїns collective has authored a number of video works including dendro dreams (2017), zong (2019), K-Object from LL-Group (2019), Salty Oscillations (2021) and Endless Sea of Sand (2023), which have been screened at international film festivals and art exhibitions worldwide.
https://www.ruins.today/teta-tsybulnyk
Elias Parvulesco is an artist, curator and film archivist based in Kyiv. He is a film history scholar and programmer at the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre in Kyiv (2015 to the present); co-founder of the art and film union ruїns collective (2017–21).As a director Parvulesco has been represented at Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (2014, 2018); FIDMarseille, Festival International de Cinéma de Marseille (2022); The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2022); Glasgow Short Film Festival (2022); Molodist Kyiv International Film Festival (2018); Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival (2020).
Parvulesco’s work is in various collective exhibitions and art projects, including Gray Cube (2018); Social realism. Pretend to be different (2018); Creating Ruin (2018, 2019); Climate Emergency Movement (2019); Armed and Dangerous (2019); NHT (personal exhibition w/Teta Tsybulnyk, 2020); Kyiv Biennial (2021); Un/archiving post/industry (2021); UNFOLDING LANDSCAPES (2022); antiwarcoalition.art (2022); Chain Reaction (2022); To Watch the War—The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine (2022); Heart of Earth (2022).
In 2020, Parvulesco was nominated for the PinchukArtCentre Prize, a nationwide prize in contemporary art to young Ukrainian artists.
https://www.ruins.today/elias-parvulesco
Mykola Ridnyi (b. 1985, Kharkiv, Ukraine) is an artist, filmmaker, and curator currently based in Berlin, where he holds a guest professorship for multimedia art at the Berlin University of the Arts.Since 2005, he has been a founding member of the SOSka group, an art collective based in Kharkiv. The same year he cofounded the SOSka gallery-lab, an artist-run-space in Kharkiv. Under Ridnyi's lead, the gallery-lab was instrumental in developing the artistic scene in the region before it was closed in 2012. Starting from his curatorial project Armed and Dangerous (2017 – 2021), Ridnyi developed a collaborative platform between Ukrainian moving image artists and filmmakers. In 2022 he curated several screening programs of Ukrainian film and video art in DAAD gallery in Berlin, MAXXI Rome, Museum Folkwang Essen, National Gallery in Sofia.
Ridnyi works across media ranging from early collective actions in public space to the amalgam of site-specific installations. Photography and moving image constitute the current focus of his practice. In recent films and images, he experiments with nonlinear montage, collage of documentary and fiction. His way of reflecting social and political reality draws on the contrast between fragility and resilience of individual stories and collective histories. He graduated from Kharkiv National Academy of Design and Arts in 2008, where he studied sculpture.
https://www.mykolaridnyi.com/
Past Artists / 2023:
Asia Bazdyrieva (b. 1986, Svitlodarsk) is an art historian whose research spans visual culture, feminist epistemology, and environmental humanities at large. Her projects focus on Soviet modernity and its ideological and material implications in spaces, bodies, and lands. She holds an MA in Art History from City University of New York and an MS in Analytical Chemistry from the Kyiv National University. She was a Fulbright scholar in 2015–2017, an Edmund S. Muskie fellow (2017), and resident at Transmediale (Berlin). She is currently associated with Critical Media Lab (Basel).
Bazdyrieva co-authored ‘Geocinema’—a collaborative project exploring the possibilities of a “planetary” notion of cinema. Concerned with the understanding and sensing of the earth while being on the ground, the project includes vastly distributed processes of image and meaning making. ‘Geocinema’s work has been shown internationally, including the solo show Making of Earths at Kunsthall Trondheim Norway (2020), and group shows including Critical Zones at ZKM Karlsruhe (2020-21), Re-thinking Collectivity at Guangzhou Image Triennale (2021) and Sensing Scale at Kunsthalle Muenster (2021). They have given lecture-performances at the Ashkal Alwan Beirut, ICA London, HKW Berlin, NYU Shanghai, Matadero Madrid, and have taught at the Berlin University of the Arts, FAMU Prague, Central Saint Martins, RCA London among others. As part of ‘Geocinema’, Bazdyrieva was a 2018–19 Digital Earth Fellow; the project has been nominated for the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research (2020), and the Golden Key prize at the Kassel filmfestival (2021).
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/127/465214/no-milk-no-love/
Collaborating at the edge of visual art and cinema since 2013, Kyiv-based artists and filmmakers Roman Khimei (b.1992, Kolomyia) and Yarema Malashchuk (b.1993, Kolomyia) graduated as cinematographers from the Institute of Screen Arts in Kyiv, Ukraine. They were awarded the main award of the PinchukArtCentre Prize (2020), VISIO Young Talent Acquisition Prize (2021), as well as the Grand Prix at the Young Ukrainian Artists Award (MUHi 2019). Their debut documentary feature “New Jerusalem” premiered at Docudays UA International Film Festival 2020. The film received the Special Mention Award at Kharkiv MeetDocs and the duo also participated at the Future Generation Art Prize 2021. Their video works are in collections of Frac Bretagne, Fondazione In Between Art Film, and Seven Gravity Collection. Yarema and Roman are members of the Prykarpattian Theater art collective.
https://www.yaremaandhimey.com/
https://theater-hopes-expectations.com/
Dana Kavelina (b.1995 in Melitopol) is a filmmaker, animator, and artist based in Kyiv/ Lviv, Ukraine (currently fled to Germany). Working primarily with animation and video, her practice includes installations, painting, and graphics that thematize military violence and war from a gender perspective. Positioning the victim as a political subject, her works investigate the distance between historical and individual trauma, memory and misrepresentation. Her works have been exhibited in: Kristianstad Kunsthalle (Sweden); Fridman Gallery (New York); Haus der Kunst (Munich); HKW (Berlin); and screened as part of the e-flux program “War and Cinema”, and MoMA’s screening program “Notes from the ground”. In 2018, Kavelina’s animated film Mark Tulip, who spoke with flowers received the Special Jury Prize at the OIFF and the Grand Prix of the KROK festival. She is a graduate of the Department of Graphics at the National Technical University of Ukraine.
https://www.vatmh.org/en/-distinguished-visitor.html
https://www.e-flux.com/video/339843/letter-to-a-turtledove/
Zhanna Ozirna (b.1986, Kirovohrad) is a film director and screenwriter based in Kyiv, Ukraine. She is a member of the Ukrainian Film Academy and Directors Guild of Ukraine, a 2020 alumna of Berlinale Talents, and a 2022 résident at Cité international des arts. Her animation short project Anna & Gravity won Jury Special Mention for the best story pitching at the interfilm Berlin Script Lab 2020. Her short fiction The Adult was presented in the special programme The State of a New Generation at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur 2019.
The development of her feature debut Ground Zero was supported by the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation. The project took part in international script workshops ScripTeast (2021) and Pustnik (2020, 2022), and in professional platforms La Fabrique Cinéma, Brussels Bozar Industry Day, New Horizons Studio+ and co-production markets of IFF Rotterdam Cinemart and Marché du Film of Festival de Cannes. In September 2021 Ground Zero received funding from the Ukrainian State Film Agency, however shooting was postponed due to the war and is now scheduled for August 2023. She is currently working on a new feature project Honeymoon, based on real events that have taken place in Ukraine since the Russian invasion.
https://www.institutfrancais.com/en/magazine/interview/zhanna-ozirna-presents-her-debut-feature-film-ground-zero
https://www.berlinale-talents.de/bt/talent/zhanna-ozirna/profile
Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker based in Kyiv, Ukraine. He was born in 1984 and raised on the ruins of a Documentary Film Studio in Kyiv. After studying film theory at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, he took part in several film education experiments including Home Workspace Program (Ashkal Alwan, Beirut) and Labor in a Single Shot by Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann. His films have been screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, e-flux (New York), the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Krakow IFF, DOK Leipzig, DoсAviv, Sheffield Doc Fest, Docudays IFF, S A V V Y Contemporary (Berlin), International Studio & Curatorial Program (New York), among other places, and received a number of festival awards. As an essayist he contributed to publications including Proxy Politics: Power and Subversion in a Networked Age (Archive Books, 2017), Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and East Europe: A Critical Anthology (MoMA, 2018), and e-flux journal.https://www.e-flux.com/journal/125/453868/the-case-against-the-russian-federation/