The Ukrainian Institute will serve as the commissioner of the Ukrainian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale for the next six years. The procedure for selecting projects is currently being developed, and a competition for participation in the 2027 Biennale will be announced at the beginning of 2026, announced the pavilion commissioner and creative director of the Ukrainian Institute, Tetiana Filevska.
“We have a memorandum with the Ministry of Communities and Territories Development of Ukraine and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stating that the Ukrainian Institute will be the commissioner of the Ukrainian Pavilion at the Architecture Biennale for the next six years. This means that the next two editions will also be under the Institute's responsibility. We are committed to developing a transparent project selection procedure based on the experience of other countries and the activities of the Ukrainian Institute. We will make the procedure publicly available. I think we will announce the competition at the beginning of next year,” said Filevska during the presentation of the DAKH (DAKH): Vernacular Hardcore project, which will represent Ukraine at the 19th International Architecture Biennale (Biennale Architettura 2025: Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective) in Venice from May 10 to November 23.
She clarified that the memorandum was signed on January 31, 2025, and the preparation for the pavilion began on that date. Due to critically tight deadlines, there was no opportunity to organize a competition procedure, so this year’s project was chosen through consultations with the sector.
“We organized group consultations, inviting architects, curators, and people who were involved in previous years with the art and architecture pavilion; we asked them about the projects they thought had already been developed. There was no time to develop ideas and concepts from scratch,” explained Filevska.
According to her, there were three requirements for the project: relevance to the general theme of the Biennale, reflection of the situation in Ukraine, and the project’s readiness and the team’s capability to realize it in critically short timeframes. Of the ten ideas, DAKH (DAKH): Vernacular Hardcore was chosen.
Filevska emphasized that such strategically important projects for representing the country, like the Venice Biennale, “should not be prepared in two months.”
“This is actually impossible, but only in Ukraine, which has been living in impossible conditions for the last 3 years, and we have become accustomed to overcoming insurmountable obstacles. But this is wrong; we should have time, opportunities, and resources to fully choose and implement all our creative ideas in a calm and organized manner,” Filevska stressed.
This year’s project, DAKH (DAKH): Vernacular Hardcore, consists of six elements. The key element is DAKH, a dynamic prototype of a vernacular Ukrainian roof developed by the curator and architect of the pavilion, Bohdana Kosmina. Selected materials are from the “Atlas of Traditional Ukrainian Housing from the Late 19th to Mid-20th Century,” a 50-year monumental research project worked on by three generations of women architects: Tamara, Oksana, and Bohdana Kosmina.
An AI avatar of architect and ethnographer Tamara Kosmina (1936–2016) rethinks independent technologies, merging personalized artificial intelligence with cultural heritage.
Documentation of emergency vernacular architecture landscapes and roof restoration processes in Chernihiv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Sumy, and Zaporizhzhia regions was conducted by the collectives "Left Bank" (Ihor Okunev, Vladyslav Sharapa, Ksenia Kalmyus) and KHARPP (Ada Wardsworth). The photographic project by Yevheniya Belorusets, “Places: Mykolaiv Region,” is dedicated to the workers of the Mykolaiv water utility. "Drone Dome" is an immersive sound installation curated by Clemens Puhl and inspired by the "Klyn" project, a grassroots initiative led by Ksenia Kalmyus focused on drone creation.
The exhibition project DAKH (DAKH): Vernacular Hardcore will be accompanied by a nomadic public program, Planetary Hardcore, which will start on May 10 at Scuola Grande di San Marco in Venice and then move to other cities in Ukraine (Kyiv, Dnipro) and around the world. The public program aims to establish connections between Ukraine and other places worldwide, where similar self-organized recovery and rebuilding efforts unite in wartime conditions.
The project is supported by the Ministry of Communities and Territories Development of Ukraine and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. Co-commissioning institutions include the Ukrainian Institute and RIBBON International. The pavilion is located at Arsenale (Sale d’Armi, building A, 1st floor).
