In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, civilians seemingly mobilized overnight. Weaving camouflage nets to shield Ukrainian defenders became one of the urgent tasks. In church basements and museums, these volunteers twisted together strips of dark fabric and rags. gocengqq

This action may seem like a smooth metaphor for a country coming together. But it disguised how complex this unity was, disuniform like the nets themselves—and how it has become even more so as the war stretches into its third year.

Titled “Net Making,” the Ukrainian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale explores this tension. Ukrainians are connected by the shared reality of war, but that collective experience is felt and lived differently. It changes if you’re a soldier or a civilian. It changes if you’re a civilian living in Kyiv, or living miles from Russian-occupied land. It changes if you’re in Warsaw, or New York, separated from a friend or a father on the frontlines. There is no singular story of the conflict.

“Net Making”is also in dialogue with the theme of the Biennale’s main exhibition, “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere.” Viktoria Bavykina and Max Gorbatskyi, the husband-and-wife team who curated the Ukrainian Pavilion, said they wanted to show how war can turn people into strangers, causing a rift between those who’ve been directly affected by it and those who have not. “In Ukrainian, [we say] inshuvannia, making someone other,” Gorbatskyi told ARTnews.

That feeling of being othered changed how Ukrainians existed in the world, Gorbatskyi said. Identities shifted. Gorbatskyi and Bavykina, who also co-founded the online platform Ukrainian. Photographies in 2022 as a response to the war, said they wanted to capture this horizontality of Ukrainian society, and the changing roles people are taking on: artist to soldier, teacher to refugee, tech worker to drone maker. These roles remain fluid as people and communities are shaped and reshaped by each new phase of the conflict. gocengqq

At the Arsenale, “Net Making” will be presented in an enclosure, designed by Oleksandr (Sasha) Burlaka, that is made from woven linens from Ukraine, dating back to the 1950s and earlier and sourced online and from flea markets. In making the metaphor of Ukrainians’ net-making during the war tangible, the architecture for the exhibition also doubles as a net connecting the three works featured in the Pavilion.

Andriy Rachinskiy and Daniil Revkovskiy’s nearly hour-long film, Civilians. Invasion (2023), takes on the war most directly, piecing together YouTube footage shot in the early days of Russia’s assault. Though countless images and videos of the war in Ukraine have circulated on social media, Rachinskiy and Revkovskiy sought videos on private and public channels that had tiny view counts, offering new and different vantage points of the conflict. Shelling is seen from the view of one apartment balcony, while a person’s escape out of a city is shot through the frame of a car window, the viewfinder shaking. They narrate breathlessly, keeping the camera rolling even as they’re unsure of what they’re recording, or how it might end. (The film is subtitled in Ukrainian and English.) Rachynskyi described it as a “selection and visualization of the collective memory of Ukrainians—those who survived the occupation and those who did not.” gocengqq