Anna Zvyagintseva
Anna Zvyagintseva is an artist from Ukraine. In 2010 she graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, department of painting, Kyiv. In her practice she investigates imperceptible, impalpable facets of life, showcasing their fragility and documenting elusive intangible moments. She is working with topics such as body, paths, useless action, and small gesture. Her oeuvre is made by an entanglement of drawing in various forms and transmedial variations like sculpture, installations, video and painting. Anna participated in the Pavilion of Ukraine Hope!, at the 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia (2015); Kyiv Biennale: The School of Kyiv (2015) and The Kyiv International (2017). She was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize in 2018. She got the Main Prize of the PinchukArtCentre Prize in 2017, and was awarded a Special Prize and has also received a Public Choice Prize in 2015. She was the finalist of the PinchukArtCentre Prize in 2013, and the finalist of MUHI prize in 2010.
ORDER OF THINGS
2015–
Bar reinforcement, welding, iron wires
129.6 × 180 × 120 cm; 158.4 × 220 × 120 cm; 158.4 × 220 × 120 cm
Courtesy Collection M HKA/Collection Flemish Community
The Order of Things by Anna Zvyagintseva (b. 1986, Dnipro) begins with images of quiet continuity: a woman holding a child, a dog resting by a window, figures gathering, pausing, inhabiting everyday life. Drawn from the artist’s archive of sketches made in peacetime, these scenes are translated into iron wires: solid, weighty, and seemingly durable. Yet the stability they suggest is immediately unsettled. Parts of the images are missing and fragments have fallen away. What once appeared whole is now interrupted.
Created during the early years of war in Ukraine, the work reflects how conflict reverberates beyond the front lines, subtly altering the fabric of daily existence. The “order of things” is no longer intact. Instead, it is marked by absence, by gaps that cannot be restored. This rupture deepens in light of 2022, when Russia’s war in Ukraine reached Kyiv, the artist’s home city. What was once an echo became a direct, physical reality. The disintegration visible in the work reads not only as metaphor, but as material consequence.
Zvyagintseva’s sculpture holds the tension between past and present, between memory and disruption, showing how even the most ordinary moments are reshaped, fractured, and redefined by the persistent presence of war.
Anna Zvyagintseva participated in the Kyiv Biennial 2025 – Homelands and Hinterlands (09.10.25–11.01.26) at M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp.
