- Main
- Artists' works
- Living Archive of the City
Кhorolska Аlina
The project explores Kyiv’s landscape as a repository of collective memory, myth, and natural processes. The video begins on Yurkovytsia, a hill that became both a site of daily observation and the starting point of the research. It then extends to Shchekavytsia, Zamkova Hora (Castle Hill), and Lysa Hora (Bald Mountain). Each of these Kyiv hills is approached as a distinct landscape of memory, where geological formations, historical events, local legends, and folk beliefs intertwine. Together, the collected materials form a series of “portraits of place,” in which the natural environment emerges as a living witness to time.
Within a digital environment, the recorded fragments are transformed into a series of animated compositions. Real botanical forms gradually evolve into imagined, almost sacred figures resembling organic beings or totems assembled from the materials of Kyiv’s landscape. Rather than reconstructing history literally, the work offers a poetic reflection on the city as a living archive, where plants, stones, and soil preserve memory longer than human testimony.
Yurkovytsia
The elders used to say that no one should come to Yurkovytsia after sunset.
That was when the river awoke.
Not the one you could see.
The one hidden beneath the earth.
If you stood there long enough in silence, it would begin to call.
Not with a voice,
but with the damp scent of soil.
People would follow that scent until they suddenly realized they had been standing where the water no longer existed.
They said that if you heard the sound of flowing water, you must never turn around.
The river does not want to be remembered.
It wants to be found.
Lysa Hora
Long ago, trees grew only sparsely on Lysa Hora.
People said the earth would not allow them to take root.
For beneath the ground slept those who must never be disturbed.
Only a single oak was unafraid.
Its roots reached so deeply that they began to hear the dreams of the earth.
Since then, whenever the wind passes through its branches, people think they hear the rustling of leaves.
In truth, the oak is retelling what it heard during the night.
Shchekavytsia
They say every hill remembers its beginning.
Shchekavytsia remembers the day when people first called this place home.
Since then, it has watched over Kyiv in silence.
Within its soil rest those whose names have long been forgotten.
In spring, they return—not as voices,
but as grasses.
They say that if you greet the sunrise on Shchekavytsia, you can hear the city growing.
Not its buildings.
Its roots.
Zamkova Hora
They say every castle has its shadow,
even when the castle itself is gone.
The stones returned to the earth.
The walls became moss.
The towers became trees.
Only the wind still remembers
where the gates once stood.
And every evening it circles them,
like a watchman
who has nothing left to guard.
Alina Khorolska a multidisciplinary artist from Rivne, Ukraine, working across video, installation, textiles, and animation. Her practice combines hand-crafted techniques—including paper cutting, collage, embroidery, and watercolor—to create new visual relationships between the material and the digital.
Her work explores memory, identity, embodiment, and fragile states of presence. Rather than constructing linear narratives, she creates contemplative environments where familiar images undergo transformation, and materiality and movement become tools for reimagining lived experience.
Media: Installation, video art, animation, textiles, collage
Residencies
2026 — Carbon Residence, Nice, France
2025 — Bakota Hub, Horaivka, Kamianets-Podilskyi District, Ukraine
2024 — Borders of Memory: Public Interventions Residency, Inter3lab Project, Poltava, Ukraine
2024 — Depot 12_59, Kyiv, Ukraine
2023 — JupiterFab, Guadalajara, Mexico
2022 — HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme, Suomenlinna Island, Helsinki, Finland
2021 — Contemporary Art Rivne Residency, Rivne Regional Museum, Rivne, Ukraine
Exhibitions
2026 — Installation in collaboration with Florent Testa, Atelier SixPointCinq Gallery, Nice, France
2026 — Syayvo Festival, Bukovyna Department, Chernivtsi, Ukraine
2026 — Intercloudness (solo exhibition), Poltava Academic Regional Puppet Theatre, Poltava, Ukraine
2025 — Nahirna 22 Group Exhibition, Berlin, Germany / Warsaw, Poland
2025 — Contours of Recovery. Interspace, Audiovisual Art Festival, Poltava, Ukraine
2025 — Group Exhibition, KNOBLACH Atelier, Kyiv, Ukraine
2025 — Fences and Houses in Horaivka, Nahirna22, Studio 139, Kyiv, Ukraine
2024 — OVNi Audiovisual Festival, Nice, France
2024 — Ethereal Vision on the Horizon, BLOOM Festival, Kyiv, Ukraine
2024 — Tender Influence Chamber, 66 hodín Festival, Smolník, Slovakia
2023 — Audiovisual Performance (with Zhenia Advokat), Carbon, Riga, Latvia
2023 — Una Calle Llamada Bandera, JupiterFab, Guadalajara, Mexico
2022 — The Splitting and the Space Between, Ukraine Solidarity Residencies Exhibition, Helsinki, Finland
2022 — HIAP Open Studios (Spring, Summer, Autumn), Suomenlinna, Finland
2022 — HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, Germany
2022 — Modern Art Research Institute of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine
2021 — Photomontage. Abstract Composition, Rivne, Ukraine
2020 — Slova i Bukvy (with Zhenia Advokat), Kyiv, Ukraine
2019 — Decomposition and Synthesis, Vertuha Arts Festival, Kyiv, Ukraine
2018 — Art Wednesday, IZONE, Kyiv, Ukraine
2018 — Go Beyond, Eidos Center, Kyiv, Ukraine
2018 — Zazhive, Studios of Live History, Kyiv, Ukraine
2018 — I am SINoptics, AkT Artspace, Kyiv, Ukraine
2018 — Where to Next?, IZOLYATSIA, Kyiv, Ukraine
2017 — Ballpoint Pen, A4, Karas Gallery, Kyiv, Ukraine
2016 — Zine Island(s), Escola-Estúdio RAIZVANGUARDA, Portugal