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.
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
“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 July 2026
We Carried the Soil with Us
On show: 20.03.2026 to 10.05.2026
Middelstegracht 87
2312 TT Leiden
The Netherlands
What is “origin” when the ground is cratered, mined, irradiated or simply out of reach? We Carried the Soil with Us brings together four Ukrainian female artists who treat soil as evidence: a living archive that absorbs violence, holds seeds, and keeps returning in unexpected forms.
Together, the works pass soil from plant to emulsion, from industry to breath, from private ritual to geopolitical fact. Rooted in Ukrainian experience and open to a wider now, the exhibition asks how we carry places in bodies and habits, and what kinds of temporary ground art can offer, without pretending at closure.
Artists
Katia Motylova-Babinska
Stefaniia Bodnia
Karolina Uskakovych
Anna Khvyl
Curator
Dasha Lohvynova
Graphic design
Vita Kiewiet de Jonge
Katia Motylova-Babinska works with analogue photography and irradiation, letting damage enter the film itself so that each image becomes both relic and ruin.
KATIA MOTYLOVA-BABINSKA — Decay of Matter
Katia Motylova-Babinska is a visual artist and researcher, born in Luhansk and based in The Hague. Working with analogue photography, archives, and books, she returns to moments when control slips, when reality refuses to be neatly explained, archived, or managed. Her practice is attentive to the quiet violence of systems, and to the personal cost of living inside their aftermath.
Her project Decay of Matter enters the exhibition like a contaminated whisper. It moves through the post-industrial landscapes of Eastern Ukraine, where history, environment, and memory are layered so tightly they blur.
The work is sparked by a little-known event from 1979: a so-called ‘peaceful’ nuclear explosion carried out in the east of the Ukrainian SSR, meant to improve coal mining, but leaving severe and lasting ecological consequences. Motylova-Babinska photographs steppe plants and subjects the images to irradiation, letting destructive forces to intervene directly in the film’s emulsion. The result fluctuates between documentation and abstraction. Each photograph becomes both ruin and relic, evidence altered by the very conditions it tries to record, a landscape caught between memory and mutation.
Stefaniia Bodnia follows the afterlife of extraction - from coal and steel to the neon that fuels global technologies - pressing ash, charcoal, and metal into a material language of geotrauma and power.
STEFANIIA BODNIA —
The Portrait & Echoes on porous ground (fragment 1,2/5)
Born in Eastern Ukraine and based in the Netherlands, Stefaniia Bodnia works between art and design, grounded in visual culture, language, and politics. She uses graphic design as means of communication and moves between publications, typography, type design, and prints. Her research-driven projects often engage with materiality, rooted in overlooked materials, tracing power relations between East and West, and the politics of visibility.
Her relationship to geopolitics is not abstract. She grew up amid heavy industry, mining, and war. In We Carried the Soil with Us, Bodnia follows the post-industrial landscape of Eastern Ukraine as a site where geology meets force. The works trace a chain of extraction: coal mining, black metallurgy, and neon gas as a by-product of steel production - first for military use, later for semiconductors. Before 2022, Ukraine supplied a significant share of the world’s neon; war disrupted this flow as major facilities, including Mariupol, were shut down. Here, these facts become material: how war travels through supply chains, light, and the ground itself.
Karolina Uskakovych approaches soil through intimacy: a documentary relationship between generations, where tomato seeds and online gardening become a way to endure war through care.
KAROLINA USKAKOVYCH — Boots on the Ground, Hands in the Soil
Karolina Uskakovych is a multidisciplinary filmmaker, designer, and artist working at the edges where media, design, and research meet. Shaped by the Non Linear Narrative MA at the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague, and her current research at Nottingham University on high-tech farming, she explores frictions between nature, culture, and technology, searching for forms that hold complexity and care. Moving between experimental and documentary approaches, the notion of collaboration is central to her work, approaching knowledge as something cultivated together.
In Boots on the Ground, Hands in the Soil, Uskakovych follows an intimate lineage of cultivation. The film traces her bond with grandmother Zoya, a Ukrainian pensioner devoted to a non-capitalist, peasant way of life. In winter 2021, Karolina receives a package of tomato seeds from Zoya - ordinary yet careful and full of future. When the next season collides with Russia’s full-scale invasion, they continue anyway, tending their gardens online: watching leaves, sharing weather, speaking through uncertainty. Soil becomes their shared language across distance - witness and shelter, held in the hands.
Anna Khvyl’s work folds in the domestic and the infrastructural, tracing how “home” is rebuilt from fragments, voices, and the spaces between Ukraine and the Netherlands.
ANNA KHVYL — When Forever Begins
Anna Khvyl works with sound, storytelling, and urban routes. She collects audio diaries of casual conversations and everyday acoustic situations, then shapes these materials into compositions experienced while walking as a group. Through group listening performances, made in collaboration with the soundscape and physical environments of public spaces, she explores practices of commemoration and the role of sound within them: how listening can create shared bonds, and how it can carry meanings that images or written accounts cannot hold.
In We Carried Soil with Us, Khvyl presents When Forever Begins, a three-part work shaped by turning points in lived experience of war: the beginning, the end, and captivity. Conversations are intertwined with vocal sounds and the textures of daily life, forming a composition that refers to musical ideas of time. The work engages with the political metaphor of voice alongside the artistic idea of controlling the vocal cords and diaphragm in order to sing. It invites us to listen from two opposing perspectives at once: the voice of a witness speaking of crimes, and the voice of an ancient musical instrument- two registers of memory held in the air.
Stichting FarNear is a registered foundation (”stichting”) in The Netherlands / RSIN: 869217823 / KvK: 99990903 / Nassaukade 15 2, 1052 CG, Amsterdam / info@farnear.nl