Maria Lanko is a curator and researcher focusing on the (unwritten) history of Ukrainian contemporary art. She is co-founder of The Naked Room, a space in Kyiv that integrates a gallery with a bookshop and a bar. The gallery program focuses on emerging artists with an ambition to introduce them in the art market both nationally and internationally. The Naked Room collaborates with several established artists and/or estates to procure recognition of their early work and archives as well as revisit forgotten or unrealized projects. As part of this practice, in 2022 in collaboration with Lizaveta German and Borys Filonenko, Maria co-curated the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. The exhibition traced a 30-year history of “Fountain of Exhaustion” by Pavlo Makov and produced the piece for the first time since its conception. (In this Art Margins interview, Maria talks about the journey to evacuate the artwork for the Biennale at the beginning of the russian war against Ukraine.) She lives and works in Kyiv.
Photo by Oleh Pashkovsky
