Ukraine's Odessa Reimagined as Mediterranean Capital at Malta Biennale

At the inaugural edition of maltabiennale.art, Ukrainian artist Alevtina Kakhidze presents the project "From South to North" in the Ukrainian Pavilion, curated by Kateryna Semenyuk and Oksana Dovgopolova of the Kyiv-based cultural platform Past / Future / Art. The pavilion, organized in collaboration with the Odesa National Fine Arts Museum, reframes Odessa not as a southern city of the Russian Empire but as a new capital north of the Mediterranean. Kakhidze's site-specific installation includes a film, a plexiglass timeline, and an abstract map on canvas without borders, listing cities involved in the narrative. The central video "All Good?", made with Roman Khimei, imagines a dialogue with the artist's father, visiting locations from her parents' past: the steel cable factory where her mother worked and the naval infantry academy where her father served. The timeline, created with historian Guram Odisharia and botanists Olexii Kovalenko and Mykhailo Zhurba, connects four generations of Kakhidze's family to 20th-century Ukrainian history, up to the ongoing Russian invasion. The project was realized by the NGO Cultural Practices with support from the IZOLYATSIA foundation, Trans Europe Halles, Malý Berlín, and co-financed by the EU program ZMINA: Rebuilding. Aromateque is a special partner of the pavilion.