Who are we?
We are an independent not-for-profit arts organisation, bringing Ukrainian artistic and cultural presence into the heart of European cultural life.
FarNear is based on @Nomadische Boekenplank, created by Ihor Sukhorukov in 2023, combined with the artistic practice & projects of Christian van der Kooy and academic research of Dasha Lohvynova.
Ukrainian culture is not seen as an integral part of European culture, while every day our common heritage is being destroyed.
Our foundation aims to remove this blind spot while solidifying Ukrainian presence within the European cultural context to create a living dialogue.
Why now?
FarNear exists to bring back lost and forgotten parts of European culture from Ukraine, uncovering shared roots and offering new perspectives. It aims to integrate Ukrainian culture into a broader European cultural context, connecting artists and culture-makers that enrich both sides. At the same time, it brings forward what is contemporary today and what has the potential to become canonical tomorrow.
CONTACT
FOUNDATION STRUCTURE
Board
Ihor Sukhorukov
Dasha Lohvynova
Christian van der Kooij
Advisory Board
Jeroen van Zelst
Radboud Molijn
Iryna Negovan
ORGANISATION DETAILS
Stichting FarNear
RSIN: 869217823
KvK: 99990903
Postal address:
Fraunhoferstraat 19
1098 LN Amsterdam
The Netherlands
“Ukraine is not measured in territories, ruined cities, or numbers tallied, but in emotionally resonant stories that mobilise and bind people together culturally, while existing through time and generations.”
Exhibitions
“We Carried the Soil with Us” curated by Dasha Lohvynova with artists: Katia Motylova-Babinska, Stefaniia Bodnia, Karolina Uskakovych and Anna Khvyl, TROEF Leiden.
Exhibition on show: 20.03.2026 to 10.05.2026
Concerts
SplenDOOR to Ukraine, a series of concerts of Ukrainian classical music accompanied by Ihor Sukhorukov’s lectures about the Ukrainian cultural context, Splendor Amsterdam, ongoing...
Last Updated April 2026
Regeneration Generation 2024 & 2026
The project co-created by the FarNear Foundation and Kharkiv Literature Museum, explores how russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has decisively shaped cultural development and expression within the frontline city of Kharkiv. Refusing to succumb to hate or despair, Ukrainian culture-makers breathe light, poetry, and hope into the world despite the horrors of war.
By connecting the now-living cultural-makers in Kharkiv to a Dutch audience, the project aims to chronicle the bootstrapping co-creation of the local culture-makers, and reflect on the changes they passed through, on intellectual, artistic, and emotional levels. It will showcase and reflect on resilience on a human level: not as a superpower, but as fragility and daily choice to keep on creating.
These artists, poets, actors, and musicians do not have the luxury of a developed cultural infrastructure, safe venues with shelters, platforms, media coverage, critics, or sometimes even an audience. They possess no state support, and are very limited in institutional, organisational, or financial resources. They are a generation deprived of internal and external security due to the full-scale war — deprived of (mental) health, prospects, and social approval. Their city, homes, spaces, and lives can be damaged or destroyed at any moment.
They have no ambition to fit into the current conjuncture, but there is no opposition to it either. They are not followers of any artistic trend except the trend of life itself. This generation’s only desire is to do things without which it is impossible to live. They grow like sprouts from stumps simply because such is the logic of life. Life necessarily reproduces itself. It regenerates.
They are the people of the dramatic 2020s, whose twenties and thirties bear a haunting resemblance to the 1920s in Kharkiv — the crime of Moscow's repressions against Ukrainian cultural figures. Figures who, after long decades of oblivion, have become legends. As 100 years ago, in the 1920s, theater, cinema, poetry, and art sprouts were intertwined in a chaotic garden of fruit and berry thickets. These do not so much feed the hungry as give life to new ones, especially when these fruits and berries fall to the ground, even though the previous garden was squelched by russians too.
Kharkiv is central to this idea because the city has been Ukraine's key cultural and intellectual laboratory where artistic language, political imagination and forms of collective creativity have been tested with particular intensity. It is here that the historical echoes and continuity between the cultural revival of the 1920s and the defiant creativity of the 2020s becomes the most visible. And it is the Literature Museum that is the link that connects the past to the present, that is why they work with memory: “Memory is not about the past, but about us now and what we can be in the future.”
Despite its name, the museum is not limited to literature, but instead embraces all possible forms of art, from young rebels to great writers and academic researchers.
Today, for the first time in history, Ukrainians have a State of Ukraine that has long and confidently resisted the russian occupation forces. Everything significant and existential appears there. The source of strength in society is called “culture.” This source nourishes everyone who is connected to it. They create it. And it unites.
For further information, please refer to:
christianvanderkooy.com