I am a problem here.?
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On October 16, 2025, the exhibition project “I am a problem here.?” opened at the M17 Contemporary Art Center, featuring 40 Ukrainian female artists.
Artists of the project: AntiGonna, Diana Berg, Svitlana Biedarieva, Julia Beliaeva, Oksana Briukhovetska, Dasha Chechushkova, Polina Choni, Olena Dombrovska, Margo Dubovska, Ksenia Hnylytska, Alevtina Kakhidze, Daria Khozhai, Kinderseele, Alina Kopytsia, Anastasiia Kulik, Maria Kulikovska, Nina Lahuta, Anastasiia Leliuk, Kateryna Lisova, Liubov Malikova, Maria Matiashova, Daria Molokoiedova, Polina Moroz, Sevilâ Nariman-qizi, Alina Prokopenko, Masha Reva, Richka, Rina Riga, Anna Serzhant, Polina Shcherbyna, Tania Shcheglova, Maryna Skuharieva, Olga Stein, Yevheniia Sydorenko, Karina Synytsia, Maryna Talutto, Tamara Turliun, Anastasiia Tymoshenko, V (anonymous artist), Emine Ziyatdin.
“The Problem” is the one whose presence unsettles the established order. The one that does not fit. The one that asks too much. The one that keeps silent too loudly.
The one that refuses to vanish – after childbirth, after aging, after invisibility, after death, in war. Despite everything.
This exhibition is not about women’s art. It is an exhibition of women who persist. They are the full stop – presence itself, and a question addressed to the system, to history, to war, to a culture still unsure what to do with women’s rage, women’s knowledge, with the body, with faith, with stature, with silence, with pleasure, aggression, children, daughters, clay, motherhood, bohemia, exile, skin, flesh, grief, solidarity, and expectancy.
They are not a circle. Not a group. Not a slice of “women’s art.” They are subjects of art – artists, creators.
The exhibition brings together artists across generations, regions, and lived experiences: from those rooted in Crimea and Kyiv to those dwelling in exile or at the frontier. Some of them work with the body as the only home. Some with clay as if with flesh. Some painted Kyiv nights in 1988, with a sense of anticipation what was to come; others craft passports out of cream, fat, and chocolate. Some dissolve in performance, some became radical and physical with the onset of war, some retreat into poetry just to survive.
This is an attempt to see women’s artistic statements not as a “female voice,” but as artifacts of conflict. Not as representation, but as an interruption of silence regime.
“I am a problem here.?” – a question without a question mark. Without accountability. Without apology. An invitation into a space where women’s presence becomes layered, complex, irreducible. And no longer asks permission.
The exhibition “I am a problem here.?” questions the very possibility of a “normal” female existence in wartime – or rather, its impossibility. In a prolonged conflict, women’s presence is always branded as wrong: too emotional, too silent, too sheltered, too visible, too ‘escaped’, too ‘stayed’.
The exhibition resists framing the image of “woman as heroine,” and refuses to reduce itself to “women’s art” as subject. Instead, it turns to the woman-artist as a disruption to the very mechanisms that attempt to organize and contain the experience of war. In Sara Ahmed’s terms, she is “the feminist killjoy”: the one who won’t allow pain to be erased, embodiment to be blurred, consensus to be faked.
In war, a woman has no single role. She is both front and rear, mother and exile, artist and suspect. She has to speak, but without disturbing. She must live, yet conceal the body. Her presence is a contradiction that cannot be harmonized – neither within heroic narrative nor within peaceful humanism.
We face a political embodiment that aligns with neither gender role nor national canon. This embodiment is the exhibition’s primary artistic material.
The participants work with spaces of rupture:
– with the body, both object of protection and battlefield;
– with the image, balanced between wit and trauma;
– with memory unbound by territory;
– with an aesthetics that does not attempt to “mend,” but rather keeps the tension alive.
This is not representation of experience. This is resistance to the formatting of experience.
We are not seeking to answer “What is a woman’s place in war?” We point to the falseness of the question itself. The exhibition “I am a problem here.?” unfolds as a heterogeneous field of interventions, where women’s presence is not explained away but lingers, gains weight, and takes up space. Like smoke. Like clay. Like wounded memory. Like an act performed.
Author: Maria Kulikovska, Project Curator
M17 Work Hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 11:00–20:00 (Monday – closed)
Address: 102-104 V. Antonovycha St., Kyiv city, Ukraine
Admission fees:
Full price ticket = 150 UAH
Concessions = 100 UAH
Tickets can be purchased at the M17 CAC.
Leave your feedback about the exhibition via this link.
Project Curator — Maria Kulikovska
Director of M17 CAC — Natalia Shpytkovska
The exhibition is supported by Adamovskiy Foundation.
M17 Contemporary Art Center is a cultural institution that functions as an educational and research platform, an exhibition venue for Ukrainian and foreign contemporary art. The activities of the Center are aimed at creating a dialogue space for professional circles and all the representatives of the culture sector as a whole, at study and research of contemporary and related historical cultural processes. M17 supports art experiments, collaborations and international exchanges of experts, artists from various art fields, in order to integrate Ukrainian art into the world context.
Adamovskiy Foundation is a non-profit foundation founded in 2018 by businessman Andriy Adamovskiy. The Foundation’s activities are aimed at preserving and studying the cultural heritage of Ukraine and Eastern Europe. The Foundation’s mission is to promote culture and art as a guarantee of sustainable and enlightened development of society. The Foundation is actively involved in organising and supporting exhibition projects, publishing initiatives, educational and discussion platforms, international forums and expert sessions.
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On 16 October 2025 the M17 Centre for Contemporary Art hosted the opening of the large-scale exhibition project “I am a problem here.?”, which united 40 Ukrainian female artists.
40 Ukrainian female artists created a space where women’s presence becomes a voice of resistance and strength.
Too emotional, too quiet, too guarded, too visible, too gone, too stayed.
The exhibition features works by 40 female artists from different generations, regions and backgrounds: from Crimea and Kyiv to those living in exile or on the frontier.
This Thursday, 16 October at 18:00 the exhibition project “I am a problem here.?” will open at the M17 Contemporary Art Centre.
On 16 October, the M17 Contemporary Art Centre in Kyiv will open an exhibition project entitled ‘'I am a problem here.?’, which explores women’s experiences in the reality of war and the challenges they face in society and culture.
The exhibition features works by 40 female artists from different generations, regions and backgrounds: from Crimea and Kyiv to those living in exile or on the frontier.
More than forty artists of different generations and artistic practices are taking part in the exhibition. Among them are Julia Beliaeva, Ksenia Hnylytska, Alevtina Kakhidze, Maria Matiashova, Masha Reva, Dasha Chechushkova, Olga Stein, and others.
The exhibition ‘'I am a problem here.?’’ questions the very possibility of a ‘normal’ existence for women in wartime. More precisely, it's impossibility.
On 16 October 2025, the M17 Contemporary Art Centre will open an exhibition that questions the very possibility of a woman's ‘normal’ existence in wartime.
The exhibition ‘I am a problem here.?’ questions the very possibility of a ‘normal’ female existence during war. More precisely, its impossibility.
The exhibition ‘I am the problem here.?’ questions the very possibility of a ‘normal’ existence for women in wartime. More precisely, its impossibility.
Forty female artists from different generations and regions will take part in the collective exhibition ‘“I am a problem here.?”. The exhibition, dedicated to the existence of women in wartime, will open on 16 October.
This exhibition is not about ‘women's art.’ It is an exhibition of women who are. Artists from different generations and backgrounds — from Crimea to emigration — work with the body, memory, poetry, and materials to express the inexpressible.
