Kherson. The Steppe Holds (curatorial text)

The Kherson. The Steppe Holds exhibition invites visitors on a journey through the multi-layered history of Kherson and the wider Kherson region. A place where personal archives, family memory, and the director’s imagination are so deeply woven into the southern Ukrainian landscape that reality becomes indistinguishable from fiction, and truth from mirage.

These archives, stories, and visions all belong to the creative and life partnership of director Roman Bondarchuk and producer-screenwriter Darya Averchenko. Their connection to Kherson is total, rooted in ancestral roots, family histories, and the movies they have created together. These feature films and documentaries result from years of travel, research, archival work, and the efforts of large teams, without whom these works would not exist.

Through these films, visitors are invited to immerse themselves in the region of Kherson, exploring different dimensions of time, cultural geography, history, mythology, and memory. The journey begins at the mouth of the Dnipro River, in the village of Stara Zburyivka, the setting of the documentary Ukrainian Sheriffs (2015). It flows upstream to the city of Kherson, Roman and Darya’s hometown, where their latest feature film, The Editorial Office (2024), was filmed. It culminates in Beryslav, on the banks of the Kakhovka Reservoir, with Volcano (2018) – a film that earned Roman Bondarchuk the Shevchenko National Prize.

Each of these films features mainly non-professional actors and local residents, and the characters and plots in these films are based on real people and stories, recognisable even to those who have never been to the Kherson region. The actual sheriffs of Stara Zburyivka, Viktor and Volodya, mediate rural conflicts and investigate so-called regional separatism. An amateur photographer, through whom we catch glimpses of a young Roman, takes it upon himself to defend truth and justice in a post-truth world. And Darya’s uncle Vova becomes the prototype for a Beryslav entrepreneur who builds a phantasmagorical world permeated with love for the people and the steppes around him, even as the familiar yet lifeless world order around him falls apart.

All these stories were carefully gathered by Roman, Darya, and Alla Tyutyunnik, co-writer of the scripts for Volcano and The Editorial Office, and a co-founder of the Kherson Vgoru newspaper. They spiral into a vast vortex where the past meets the future, memory clings to what is about to be lost, and mirages rise from the steppe to become part of life. All the films were shot before the full-scale invasion, when the great war was still very far from Kherson — but its presence is palpable in each one.

The full-scale war changed everything and, with its characteristic radicalism and paradoxes, revealed what had previously gone unnoticed or been deemed unimportant. Kherson has transformed from a simple city in southern Ukraine into a symbol of Ukrainian strength, resistance, and struggle — and at the same time of fragility, vulnerability, and evanescence. The films and archives of Roman Bondarchuk and Darya Averchenko have become instruments of remembrance and careful preservation of everything that the war has taken away. They pose an open question to the viewer: what is worth restoring and rebuilding, and what should be left to history?

This exhibition is an invitation to spend time with a Kherson region that no longer exists, but will surely return. It asks spectators to think about how natural and cultural landscapes shape society, how we can remember our losses, and where we find strength for the future.

Or, as Uncle Vova’s elderly mother says in the film Volcano:
“The earth holds me here. The water holds me. The steppe holds me. My home…
If you live long and love deeply, the earth loves you back. And it gives you strength.
And if you have strength, you’re happy.”

The curator of the project: Kateryna Botanova