We Carried the Soil with Us
Artists
- Katia Motylova-Babinska
- Stefaniia Bodnia
- Karolina Uskakovych
- Anna Khvyl
Curator
- Dasha Lohvynova
Graphic design
- Vita Kiewiet de Jonge
On show from 20.03.2026 to 10.05.2026
Katia Motylova-Babinska works with analogue photography and irradiation, letting damage enter the film itself so that each image becomes both relic and ruin.
Katia Motylova-Babinska is a visual artist and researcher, born in Luhansk and based in The Hague. Working with analogue photography, archives, and books, she returns to moments when control slips, when reality refuses to be neatly explained, archived, or managed. Her practice is attentive to the quiet violence of systems, and to the personal cost of living inside their aftermath.
Her project Decay of Matter enters the exhibition like a contaminated whisper. It moves through the post-industrial landscapes of Eastern Ukraine, where history, environment, and memory are layered so tightly they blur. The work is sparked by a little-known event from 1979: a so-called ‘peaceful’ nuclear explosion carried out in the east of the Ukrainian SSR, meant to improve coal mining, but leaving severe and lasting ecological consequences. Motylova-Babinska photographs steppe plants and subjects the images to irradiation, letting destructive forces to intervene directly in the film’s emulsion. The result fluctuates between documentation and abstraction. Each photograph becomes both ruin and relic, evidence altered by the very conditions it tries to record, a landscape caught between memory and mutation.
Stefaniia Bodnia follows the afterlife of extraction - from coal and steel to the neon that fuels global technologies - pressing ash, charcoal, and metal into a material language of geotrauma and power.
Born in Eastern Ukraine and based in the Netherlands, Stefaniia Bodnia moves between art and design with a practice grounded in visual culture, language, and politics. She works with publications, typography, and type design, using graphic design as a means of communication. Building research-driven projects, Bodnia’s work often starts from materials that are easily overlooked. She traces the power dynamics between East and West, the knot of materiality, technology, and the structures that decide what (and who) is extracted, circulated, and seen.
Her relationship to geopolitics is not abstract. She grew up amid heavy industry, mining, and war. In We Carried the Soil with Us, Bodnia follows the post-industrial landscape of Eastern Ukraine as a site where geology meets force. The works trace a chain of extraction: coal mining, black metallurgy, and neon gas as a by-product of steel production - first for military use, later for semiconductors. Before 2022, Ukraine supplied a significant share of the world’s neon; war disrupted this flow as major facilities, including Mariupol, were shut down. Here, these facts become material: how war travels through supply chains, light, and the ground itself.
Karolina Uskakovych approaches soil through intimacy: a documentary relationship between generations, where tomato seeds and online gardening become a way to endure war through care.
Karolina Uskakovych is a multidisciplinary filmmaker, designer, and artist working at the edges where media, design, and research meet. Shaped by the Non Linear Narrative MA at the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague, and her current research at Nottingham University on high-tech farming, she explores frictions between nature, culture, and technology, searching for forms that hold complexity and care. Moving between experimental and documentary approaches, the notion of collaboration is central to her work, approaching knowledge as something cultivated together.
In Boots on the Ground, Hands in the Soil, Uskakovych follows an intimate lineage of cultivation. The film traces her bond with grandmother Zoya, a Ukrainian pensioner devoted to a non-capitalist, peasant way of life. In winter 2021, Karolina receives a package of tomato seeds from Zoya - ordinary yet careful and full of future. When the next season collides with Russia’s full-scale invasion, they continue anyway, tending their gardens online: watching leaves, sharing weather, speaking through uncertainty. Soil becomes their shared language across distance - witness and shelter, held in the hands.
Anna Khvyl’s work folds in the domestic and the infrastructural, tracing how “home” is rebuilt from fragments, voices, and the spaces between Ukraine and the Netherlands.
Anna Khvyl works with sound, storytelling, and urban routes. She collects audio diaries of casual conversations and everyday acoustic situations, then shapes these materials into compositions experienced while walking as a group. Through group listening performances, made in collaboration with the soundscape and physical environments of public spaces, she explores practices of commemoration and the role of sound within them: how listening can create shared bonds, and how it can carry meanings that images or written accounts cannot hold.
In We Carried Soil with Us, Khvyl presents When Forever Begins, a three-part work shaped by turning points in lived experience of war: the beginning, the end, and captivity. Conversations are intertwined with vocal sounds and the textures of daily life, forming a composition that refers to musical ideas of time. The work engages with the political metaphor of voice alongside the artistic idea of controlling the vocal cords and diaphragm in order to sing. It invites us to listen from two opposing perspectives at once: the voice of a witness speaking of crimes, and the voice of an ancient musical instrument- two registers of memory held in the air.
Together, the works pass soil from plant to emulsion, from industry to breath, from private ritual to geopolitical fact. Rooted in Ukrainian experience yet open to a wider now, the exhibition asks how we carry places in bodies and habits, and what kinds of temporary ground art can offer, without pretending at closure.
Curious about the activities around We Carried the Soil with Us? Find all upcoming events in the agenda.
We Carried the Soil with Us is on show from 20.03.2026 to 10.05.2026. Many gratitudes to the artists for being part of this exhibition.